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HOMERIC TRANSLATION. 



HOMERIC TRANSLATION 

IN THEORY AND PRACTICE. 
A REPLY 

TO 

MATTHEW ARNOLD, ESQ., 

PROFESSOR OF POETRY, OXFORD. 



BY 



FRANCIS W. NEWMAN, 

A TRANSLATOR OF THE ILIAD. 



WILLIAMS AND NOR&ATE : 

14, HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN, LONDON; 

AND 

20, SOUTH FREDERICK STREET, EDINBURGH. 
1861. 



•2.1 



*$* 



PBINTED BY 

JOHN EDWABD TAYLOB, LITTLE QUEEN STBEET, 

LINCOLN'S INN FIELDS, LONDON. 



12-3737^ 



HOMERIC TRANSLATION. 



It is so difficult, amid the press of literature, for a 
mere versifier and translator to gain notice at all, 
that an assailant may even do one a service, if he so 
conduct his assault as to enable the reader to sit in 
intelligent judgment on the merits of the book as- 
sailed. But when the critic deals out to the readers 
only so much knowledge as may propagate his own 
contempt of the book, he has undoubtedly immense 
power to dissuade them from wishing to open it. 
Mr. Arnold writes as openly aiming at this end. He 
begins by complimenting me, as "a man of great 
ability and genuine learning;" but on questions of 
learning, as Well as of taste, he puts me down as 
bluntly, as if he had meant, "a man totally void 
both of learning and of sagacity." He again and 
again takes for granted that he has " the scholar " 
on his side, "the living scholar," the man who has 
learning and taste without pedantry. He bids me 
please " the scholars," and go to " the scholars' tri- 



I HOMERIC TRANSLATION. 

bunal;" and does not know that I did this, to the 
extent of my opportunity, before committing myself 
to a laborious, expensive and perhaps thankless task. 
Of course he cannot guess, what is the fact, that 
scholars of fastidious refinement, but of a judgment 
which I think far more masculine than Mr. Arnold's, 
have passed a most encouraging sentence on large 
specimens of my translation. I at this moment 
count eight such names, though of course I must not 
here adduce them: nor will I further allude to it, 
than to say, that I have no such sense either of pride 
or of despondency, as those are liable to, who are 
consciously isolated in their taste. 

Scholars are the tribunal of Erudition, but of Taste 
the educated but unlearned public is the only right- 
ful judge; and to it I wish to appeal. Even scholars 
collectively have no right, and much less have single 
scholars, to pronouace a final sentence on questions 
of taste in their court. Where I differ in Taste from 
Mr. Arnold, it is very difficult to find " the scholars' 
tribunal," even if I acknowledged its absolute juris- 
diction : but as regards Erudition, this difficulty does 
not occur, and I shall fully reply to the numerous 
dogmatisms by which he settles the case against me. 

But I must first avow to the reader my own mode- 
rate pretensions. Mr. Arnold begins by instilling 
two errors which he does not commit himself to as- 



IN THEORY AND PRACTICE. 3 

sert. He says that my work will not take rank as 
the standard translation of Homer, but other transla- 
tions will be made : — as if I thought otherwise ! If 
I have set the example of the right direction in which 
translators ought to aim, of course those who follow 
me will improve upon me and supersede me. A 
man would be rash indeed to withhold his version of 
a poem of fifteen thousand lines, until he had, to his 
best ability, imparted to them all their final perfec- 
tion. He might spend the leisure of his life upon 
it. He would possibly be in his grave before it could 
see the light. If it then were published, and it was 
founded on any new principle, there would be no one 
to defend it from the attacks of ignorance and pre- 
judice. In the nature of the case, his wisdom is to 
elaborate in the first instance all the high and noble 
parts carefully, and get through the inferior parts 
somehow ; leaving of necessity very much to be done 
in successive editions, if possibly it please general 
taste sufficiently to reach them. A generous and in- 
telligent critic will test such a work mainly or solely 
by the most noble parts, and as to the rest, will con- 
sider whether the metre and style adapts itself natu- 
rally to them also. 

Next, Mr. Arnold asks, "Who is to assure Mr. 
" Newman, that when he has tried to retain every 
" peculiarity of his original, he has done that for 

b 2 



4 HOMERIC TRANSLATION. 

" which Mr. Newman enjoins this to be done, — ad- 
"hered closely to Homer's manner and habit of 
"thought? Evidently the translator needs more 
" practical directions than these." The tendency of 
this is, to suggest to the reader that I am not aware 
of the difficulty of rightly applying good principles ; 
whereas I have in this very connection said expressly, 
that even when a translator has got right principles, 
he is liable to go wrong in the detail of their applica- 
tion. This is as true of all the principles which Mr. 
Arnold can possibly give, as of those which I have 
given; nor do I for a moment assume, that in wri- 
ting fifteen thousand lines of verse I have not made 
hundreds of blots. 

At the same time Mr. Arnold has overlooked the 
point of my remark. Nearly every translator before 
me has knowingly, purposely, habitually shrunk from 
Homer's thoughts and Homer's manner. The reader 
will afterwards see whether Mr. Arnold does not jus- 
tify them in their course. It is not for those who are 
purposely unfaithful to taunt me with the difficulty 
of being truly faithful. 

I have alleged, and, against Mr. Arnold's flat 
denial, I deliberately repeat, that Homer rises and 
sinks with his subject, and is often homely or prosaic. 
I have professed as my principle, to follow my ori- 
ginal in this matter. It is unfair to expect of me 



HOW TO CRITICIZE IT. 5 

grandeur in trivial passages. If in any place where 
Homer is confessedly grand and noble, I have marred 
and ruined his greatness, let me be reproved. But I 
shall have occasion to protest, that Stateliness is not 
Grandeur, Picturesqueness is not Stately, Wild 
Beauty is not to be confounded with Elegance: a 
Forest has its swamps and brushwood, as well as its 
tall trees. 

The duty of one who publishes his censures on me 
is, to select noble, greatly admired passages, and con- 
front me both with a prose translation of the original 
(for the public cannot go to the Greek) and also with 
that which he judges to be a more successful version 
than mine. Translation being matter of compromise, 
and being certain to fall below the original, when 
this is of the highest type of grandeur; the ques- 
tion is not, What translator is perfect? but, Who is 
least imperfect? Hence the only fair test is by 
comparison, when comparison is possible. But Mr. 
Arnold has not put me to this test. He has quoted 
two very short passages, and various single lines, half 
lines and single words, from me ; and chooses to tell 
his readers that I ruin Homer's nobleness, when (if 
his censure is just) he might make them feel it by 
quoting me upon the most admired pieces. Now 
with the warmest sincerity I say, — If any English 
reader, after perusing my version of four or five emi- 



6 HOMERIC TRANSLATION. 

nently noble passages of sufficient length, side by 
side with those of other translators, and (better still) 
with a prose version also, finds in them high qualities 
which I have destroyed; I am foremost to advise 
him to shut my book, or to consult it only (as Mr. 
Arnold suggests) as a schoolboy's " help to construe," 
if such it can be. My sole object is, to bring Homer 
before the unlearned public : I seek no self-glorifica- 
tion : the sooner I am superseded by a really better 
translation, the greater will be my pleasure. 

It was not until I more closely read Mr. Arnold's 
own versions, that I understood how necessary is his 
repugnance to mine. I am unwilling to speak of his 
metrical efforts. I shall not say more than my argu- 
ment strictly demands. It here suffices to state the 
simple fact, that for awhile I seriously doubted whe- 
ther he meant his first specimen for metre at all. 
He seems distinctly to say, he is going to give us 
English Hexameters ; but it was long before I could 
believe that he had written the following for that 
metre : — 

So shone forth, in front of Troy, by the bed of Xanthus, 

Between that and the ships, the Trojans' numerous fires. 

In the plain there were kindled a thousand fires : by each one 

There sate fifty men, in the ruddy fight of the fire. 

By their chariots stood the steeds, and champ'd the white 

barley, 
While their masters sate by the fire, and waited for Morning. 



I sincerely thought, this was meant for prose ; at 
length the two last lines opened rny eyes. He does 
mean them for Hexameters ! " Fire " (= feuer) with 
him is a spondee or trochee. The first line, I low 
see, begins with three (quantitative) spondees, and is 
meant to be spondaic in the fifth foot. "Bed of, Be- 
tween, In the," — are meant for spondees ! So are 
"There sate," "By their;" though "Troy by the" 
was a dactyl. " Champ'd the white " is a dactyl. — 
My " metrical exploits " amaze Mr. Arnold (p. 22) ; 
but my courage is timidity itself compared to his. 

His second specimen stands thus : — 

And with pity the son of Saturn saw them bewailing, 
And he shook his head, and thus address'd his own bosom : 
Ah, unhappy pair ! to Peleus why did we give you, 
To a mortal ? but ye are without old age and immortal. 
Was it that ye with man, might have your thousands of sor- 
rows? 
For than man indeed there breathes no wretcheder creature, 
Of all living things, that on earth are breathing and moving. 

Upon his he apologizes for " To a," intended as a 
spondee in the fourth line, and " -dressed his own " 
for a dactyl in the second ; liberties which, he admits, 
go rather far, but " do not actually spoil the run of 
the hexameter." In a note, he attempts to palliate 
his deeds by recriminating on Homer, though he will 
not allow to me the same excuse. The accent (it 
seems) on the second syllable of aio\o<; makes it as 



8 HOMERIC TRANSLATION. 

impure a dactyl to a Greek as " death-destin'd" is to 
us ! Mr. Arnold's erudition in Greek metres is very 
curious, if he can establish that they take any cogni- 
zance at all of the prose accent, or that alo\o$ is 
quantitatively more or less of a dactyl, according as 
the prose accent is on one or other syllable. His ear 
also must be of a very unusual kind, if it makes out 
that " death-destin'd" is anything but a downright 
Molossus. Write it dethdestind, as it is pronounced, 
and the eye, equally with the ear, decides it to be of 
the same type as the word persistunt. 

In the lines just quoted, most readers will be slow 
to believe, that they have to place an impetus of the 
voice (an ictus metricus at least) on Between, In' the, 
There sate, By their, And with, A'nd he, To a,- For 
than, Of all. Here, in the course of thirteen lines, 
composed as a specimen of style, is found the same 
offence nine times repeated, to say nothing here 
of other deformities. Now contrast Mr. Arnold's 
severity against me,* p. 82 : " It is a real fault when 
" Mr. Newman has : — 

Infatuate ! oh that thou wert | lord to some other army — 

" for here the reader is required, not for any special 
" advantage to himself, but simply to save Mr. New- 

* He attacks the same line also in p. 42 ; but I do not 
claim this as a mark, how free I am from the fault. 



ENGLISH HEXAMETERS. 9 

" man trouble, to place the accent on the insignificant 
"word wert, where it has no business whatever" 
Thus to the flaw which Mr. Arnold admits nine times 
in thirteen pattern lines, he shows no mercy in me, 
who have toiled through fifteen thousand. Besides, 
on ivert we are free at pleasure to place or not to 
place the accent; but in Mr. Arnold's Between, 
To a, etc., it is impossible or offensive. 

To avoid a needlessly personal argument, T enlarge 
on the general question of hexameters. Others, 
scholars of repute, have given example and authority 
to English hexameters. As matter of curiosity, as 
erudite sport, such experiments may have their value. 
I do not mean to express indiscriminate disapproval, 
much less contempt. I have myself privately tried 
the same in Alcaics ; and find the chief objection to 
be, not that the task is impossible, but that to execute 
it well is too difficult for a language like ours, overladen 
with consonants, and abounding with syllables neither 
distinctly long nor distinctly short, but of every inter- 
mediate length. Singing to a tune was essential to 
keep even Greek or Roman poetry to true time; to 
the English language it is of tenfold necessity. But 
if time is abandoned, (as in fact it always is,) and the 
prose accent has to do duty for the ictus metricus, the 
moral genius of the metre is fundamentally subverted. 
What previously was steady duplicate time (" march- 



10 HOMERIC TRANSLATION. 

time," as Professor Blackie calls it) vacillates between 
duplicate and triplicate. With Homer, a dactyl had 
nothing in it more tripping than a spondee : a crotchet 
followed by two quavers belongs to as grave an anthem 
as two crotchets. But Mr. Arnold himself (p. 51) 
calls the introduction of anapaests by Dr. Maginn into 
our ballad measure, " a detestable dance :" as in : 

And scarcely had she begun to wash, 
Ere she was aware of the grisly gash. 

1 will not assert that this is everywhere improper in 
the Odyssey ; but no part of the Iliad occurs to me 
in which it is proper, and I have totally excluded it 
in my own practice. T notice it but once in Mr. 
Gladstone's specimens, and it certainly offends my 
taste as out of harmony with the gravity of the rest, viz. 

My ships shall bound in the morning's light. 

In Shakspeare we have i'th' and o'th' for monosyl- 
lables, but (so scrupulous am I in the midst of my 
" atrocities ") I never dream of such a liberty myself, 
much less of avowed " anapaests." So far do I go 
in the opposite direction, as to prefer to make such 
words as Banal, victory three syllables, which even 
Mr. Gladstone and Pope accept as dissyllabic. Some 
reviewers have called my metre lege solutum ; which 
is as ridiculous a mistake as Horace made concerning 
Pindar. That, in passing. But surely Mr. Arnold's 



THE JIG OV HEXAMETERS. 11 

severe blow at Dr. Maginn rebounds with double 
force upon himself. 

To Peleus why did we give you ? — 
Hecuba's grief nor Priam my father's — 
Thousands of sorrows — 

cannot be a less detestable jig than that of Dr. Ma- 
ginn. And this objection holds against every accen- 
tual hexameter, even to those of Longfellow or Lock- 
hart, if applied to grand poetry. For bombast, in a 
wild whimsical poem, Mr. Clough has proved it to be 
highly appropriate ; and I think, the more " rollick- 
ing" is Mr. Clough, (if only I understand the word) the 
more successful his metre. Mr. Arnold himself feels 
what I say against " dactyls," for on this very ground 
he advises largely superseding them by spondees ; and 
since what he calls a spondee is any pair of syl- 
lables of which the former is accentuable, his precept 
amounts to this, that the hexameter be converted into 
a line of six accentual trochees, with free liberty left 
of diversifying it, in any foot except the last, by Dr. 
Magum's "detestable dance." What more severe 
condemnation of the metre is imaginable than this 
mere description gives? "Six trochees" seems to 
me the worst possible foundation for an English 
metre. I cannot imagine that Mr. Arnold will give 
the slightest weight to this, as a judgment from me ; 
but I do advise him to search in Samson Agonistes, 



12 HOMERIC TRANSLATION. 

Thalaba, Keharaa, and Shelley's works, for the phe- 
nomenon. 

I have elsewhere insisted, hnt I here repeat, that 
for a long poem a trochaic beginning of the verse is 
most unnatural and vexatious in English, because so 
large a number of our sentences begin with unac- 
cented syllables, and the vigour of a trochaic line 
eminently depends on the purity of its initial trochee. 
Mr. Arnold's feeble trochees already quoted (from 
Between to To a) are all the fatal result of defying 
the tendencies of our language. 

If by a happy combination any scholar could com- 
pose fifty such English hexameters, as would convey 
a living likeness of the Virgilian metre, I should ap- 
plaud it as valuable for initiating schoolboys into that 
metre : but there its utility would end. The method 
could not be profitably used for translating Homer 
or Virgil, plainly because it is impossible to say for 
whose service such a translation would be executed. 
Those who can read the original will never care to 
read through any translation ; and the unlearned look 
on all, even the best hexameters, whether from 
Southey, Lockhart or Longfellow, as odd and disa- 
greeable prose. Mr. Arnold deprecates appeal to po- 
pular taste : well he may ! yet if the unlearned are 
to be our audience, we cannot defy them. I myself, 
before venturing to print, sought to ascertain how 



QUANTITATIVE METRES. 13 

unlearned women and children would accept my 
verses. I could boast how children and half-educated 
women have extolled them ; how^greedily a working 
man has inquired for them, without knowing who was 
the trauslator ; but I well know that this is quite in- 
sufficient to establish the merits of a translation. It 
is nevertheless one point. " Homer is popular," is 
one of the very few matters of fact in this controversy 
on which Mr. Arnold and I are agreed. " English 
' ' hexameters are not popular," is a truth so obvious, 
that I do not yet believe he will deny it. Therefore, 
" Hexameters are not the metre for translating Ho- 
" mer." Q. E. D. 

I cannot but think that the very respectable scholars 
who pertinaciously adhere to the notion that English 
hexameters have something "epical" in them, have 
no vivid feeling of the difference between Accent and 
Quantity: and this is the less wonderful, since so 
very few persons have ever actually heard quantitative 
verse. I have; by listening to Hungarian poems, 
read to me by my friend Mr. Francis Pulszky, a na- 
tive Magyar. He had not finished a single page, 
before I complained gravely of the monotony. He 
replied : " So do we complain of it :" and then showed 
me, by turning the pages, that the poet cut the knot 
which he could not untie, by frequent changes of his 
metre. Whether it was a change of mere length, as 



ll HOMERIC TRANSLATION. 

from Iambic senarian to Iambic dimeter ; or implied 
a fundamental change of time, as in music from com- 
mon to minuet time^ — I cannot say. But, to my ear, 
nothing but a tune can ever save a quantitative metre 
from hideous monotony. It is like strumming a piece 
of very simple music on a single note. Nor only so ; 
but the most beautiful of anthems, after it has been 
repeated a hundred times on a hundred successive 
verses, begins to pall on the ear. How much more 
would an entire book of Homer, if chanted at one 
sitting ! I have the conviction, though I will not 
undertake to impart it to another, that if the living 
Homer could sing his lines to us, they would at first 
move in us the same pleasing interest as an elegant 
and simple melody from an African of the Gold Coast ; 
but that, after hearing twenty lines, we should com- 
plain of meagreness, sameness, and loss of moral ex- 
pression ; and should judge the style to be as inferior 
to our own oratorical metres, as the music of Pindar 
to our third-rate modern music. But if the poet, at 
our request, instead of singing the verses, read or 
spoke them, then from the loss of well marked time 
and the ascendency reassumed by the prose-accent, 
we should be as helplessly unable to hear any metre 
in them, as are the modern Greeks. 

I expect that Mr. Arnold will reply to this, that he 
reads and does not sing Homer, and yet he finds his 



THE HOMERIC ACCENT. 15 

verses to be melodious and not monotonous. To this 
I retort, that he begins by wilfully pronouncing Greek 
falsely, according to the laws of Latin accent, and arti- 
ficially assimilating the Homeric to the Virgilian line. 
Virgil has compromised between the ictus metricus 
and the prose accent, by exacting that the two coin- 
cide in the two last feet and generally forbidding it in 
the second and third foot. What is called the " femi- 
nine caesura" gives (in the Latin language) coincidence 
on the third foot. Our extreme familiarity with these 
laws of compromise enables us to anticipate recurring 
sounds and satisfies our ear. But the Greek prose 
accent, by reason of oxytons and paroxytons, and ac- 
cent on the antepenultima in spite of a long penulti- 
ma, totally resists all such compromise ; and proves 
that particular form of melody, which our scholars 
enjoy in Homer, to be an unhistoric imitation of 
Virgil. 

I am aware, there is a bold theory, whispered if 
not published, that, — so out-and-out JEolian was 
Homer, — his laws of accent must have been almost 
Latin. According to this, Erasmus, following the 
track of Virgil blindly, has taught us to pronounce 
Euripides and Plato ridiculously ill, but Homer with 
an accuracy of accent which puts Aristarchus to 
shame, This is no place for discussing so difficult a 
question. Suffice it to say, first, that Mr. Arnold 



16 HOMERIC TRANSLATION. 

cannot take refuge in such a theory, since he does 
not admit that Homer was antiquated to Euripides ; 
next, that admitting the theory to him, still the loss 
of the Digamma destroys to him the true rhythm 
of Homer. I shall recur to both questions below. 
I here add, that our English pronunciation even of 
Virgil often so ruins Virgil's own quantities, that 
there is something either of delusion or of pedantry 
in our scholars' self-complacency in the rhythm which 
they elicit. 

I think it fortunate for Mr. Arnold, that he had 
not " courage to translate Homer ;" for he must have 
failed to make it acceptable to the unlearned. But 
if the public ear prefers ballad metres, still (Mr. Ar- 
nold assumes) "the scholar" is with him in this 
whole controversy. Nevertheless it gradually comes 
out that neither is this the case, but he himself is in 
the minority. P. 103, he writes: — "When one ob- 
" serves the boisterous rollicking way in which Homer's 
" English admirers — even men of genius, like the 
" late Professor Wilson, — love to talk of Homer and 
" his poetry, one cannot help feeling that there is 
' ' no very deep community of nature between them 
" and the object of their enthusiasm." It does not 
occur to Mr. Arnold that the defect of perception lies 
with himself, and that Homer has more sides than he 
has discovered. He deplores that Dr. Maginn, and 



EPIC AND BALLAD. 17 

others whom he names, err with me, in believing that 
our ballad-style is the nearest approximation to that 
of Homer ; and avows that " it is time to say plainly" 
(p. 44) that Homer is not of the ballad-type. So 
in p. 42, " — this popular, but, it is time to say, this 
" erroneous analogy" between the ballad and Homer. 
Since it is reserved for Mr. Arnold to turn the tide of 
opinion ; since it is a task not yet achieved, but re- 
mains to be achieved by his authoritative enunciation ; 
he confesses that hitherto I have with me the suffrage 
of scholars. With this confession, a little more diffi- 
dence would be becoming, if diffidence were possible 
to the fanaticism with which he idolizes hexameters. 
P. 83, he says: — "The hexameter has a natural dig- 
" nity, which repels both the jaunty style and the jog- 
" trot style, etc. . . . The translator who uses it cannot 
" too religiously follow the inspiration of his metre," 
etc. Inspiration from a metre which has no recog- 
nized type? from a metre which the heart and soul 
of the nation ignores ? I believe, if the metre can 
inspire anything, it is to frolic and gambol with Mr. 
Clough. Mr. Arnold's English hexameter cannot be 
a higher inspiration to him, than the true hexameter 
was to a Greek : yet that metre inspired strains of 
totally different essential genius and merit. 

But I claim Mr. Arnold himself as confessing that 
our ballad metre is epical, when he says that Scott is 

c 



18 HOMERIC TRANSLATION. 

" bastard-e])ic" I do not admit that his quotations 
from Scott are at all Scott's best, nor anything like 
it ; but if they were, it would only prove something 
against Scott's genius or talent, nothing about his 
metre. The Kvirpia eirr] or 'IXlov Trepcrts were pro- 
bably very inferior to the Iliad ; but no one would on 
that account call them or the Frogs and Mice bas- 
tard-epic, unless their metre and general style had 
been epic, No one would call a bad tale of Dry den 
or of Crabbe bastard-epic. The application of the 
word to Scott virtually concedes what I assert. Mr. 
Arnold also calls Macaulay's ballads "pinchbeck;" 
but a man needs to produce something very noble 
himself, before he can afford thus to sneer at Macau- 
lay's " Lars Porsena." 

Before I enter on my own " metrical exploits," I 
must get rid of a disagreeable topic. Mr. Arnold's 
repugnance to them has led him into forms of attack, 
which I do not know how to characterize. I shall 
state my complaints as concisely as I can, and so 
leave them. 

1. I do not seek for any similarity of sound in an 
English accentual metre to that of a Greek quantita- 
tive metre; besides that Homer writes in a highly 
vocalized tongue, while ours is overfilled with conso- 
nants. I have disowned this notion of similar rhythm 
in the strongest terms (p. xvii. of my Preface), ex- 



DELUSIVE QUOTATION. 19 

pressly because some critics had imputed this aim to 
me in the case of Horace. I summed up : " It is not 
" audible sameness of metre,, but a likeness of moral 
"genius which is to be aimed at." I contrast the 
audible to the moral. Mr. Arnold suppresses this 
contrast, and writes as follows, p. 32. " Mr. Newman 
" tells us that he has found a metre like in moral 
" genius to Homer's. His judge has still the same 
" answer : l reproduce then on our ear something of 
" f the effect produced by the movement of Homer/ " 
He recurs to the same fallacy in p. 54. " For whose 
" ear do those two rhythms produce impressions of 
" [to use Mr. Newman's own words) e similar moral 
' ' ' genius ' ? " His reader will naturally suppose that 
" like in moral genius" is with me an eccentric phrase 
for " like in musical cadence." The only likeness to 
the ear which I have admitted, is, that the one and 
the other are primitively made for music. That, Mr. 
Arnold knows, is a matter of fact, whether a ballad 
be well or ill written. If he pleases, he may hold 
the rhythm of our metre to be necessarily inferior to 
Homer's and to his own ; but when I fully explained 
in my preface what were my tests of "like moral 
" genius," I cannot understand his suppressing them, 
and perverting the sense of my words. 

2. In p. 48, Mr. Arnold quotes Chapman's transla- 
tion of a SelXoi), " Poor wretched beasts" (of Achilles' 

c 2 



20 HOMERIC TRANSLATION. 

horses,) on which he comments severely. He does 
not quote me. Yet in p. 94, after exhibiting Cowper's 
translation of the same passage, he adds : " There is 
" no want of dignity here, as in the versions of Chap- 
" man and of Mr. Newman, which I have already 
" quoted" Thus he leads the reader to believe that 
I have the same phrase as Chapman ! In fact, my 
translation is : 

Ha! why on Peleus, mortal prince, 
Bestowed we you, unhappy ! 

If he had done me the justice of quoting, it is possi- 
ble that some readers would not have thought my 
rendering intrinsically " wanting in dignity," or less 
noble than Mr. Arnold's own, which is : 

Ah ! unhappy pair ! to Peleus* why did we give you, 
To a mortal ? 

In p. 49, he with very gratuitous insult remarks, that 
" i Poor wretched beasts' is a little over familiar ; but 
" this is no objection to it for the ballad-manner :f 

* If I had used such a double dative, as " to Peleus to a 
mortal," what would he have said of my syntax ? 

t HaXL&d-manner ! The prevalent ballad-w^re is the Com- 
mon Metre of our Psalm tunes : and yet he assumes that 
whatever is in this metre must be on the same level. I have 
professed (Pref. p. x.) that our existing old ballads are " poor 
and mean," and are not my pattern. 



DELUSIVE QUOTATION. 21 

u it is good enough . . . for Mr. Newman's Iliad, . . . 
" etc." Yet I myself have not thought it good enough 
for my Iliad. 

3. In p. 101, Mr. Arnold gives his own translation 
of the discourse between Achilles and his horse ; and 
prefaces it with the words, " I will take the passage 
"in which both Chapman and Mr. Newman have 
" already so much excited our astonishment." But 
he did not quote my translation of the noble part of 
the passage, consisting of 19 lines; he has merely 
quoted* the tail of it, 5 lines ; which are altogether 
inferior. Of this a sufficient indication is, that Mr. 
Gladstone has translated the 19 and omitted the 5. 
I shall below give my translation parallel to Mr. 
Gladstone's. The curious reader may compare it 
with Mr. Arnold's, if he choose. 

4. In p. 96, Mr. Arnold quotes from Chapman as 
a translation of orav ttot oXcoKrj "IXto? Iprj, 

" When sacred Troy shall shed her tow'rs for tears of 
overthrow ;" 

and adds : " What Mr. Newman's manner of render- 
" ing would be, you can by this time sufficiently ima- 
" gine for yourselves." Would be ! Why does he 

* He has also overlooked the misprint Trojans, where I 
wrote Trdians (in three syllables), and has thus spoiled one 
verse out of the five. 



22 HOMERIC TRANSLATION'. 

set his readers to " imagine," when in fewer words he 
could tell them what my version is ? It stands thus : 

A day, when sacred Ilium | for overthrow is destin'd, — 

which may have faults unperceived by me, but is in 
my opinion far better than Mr. Arnold's, and cer- 
tainly did not deserve to be censured side by side with 
Chapman's absurdity. I must say plainly ; a critic 
has no right to hide what I have written, and stimu- 
late his readers to despise me by these indirect me- 
thods. 

I proceed to my own metre. It is exhibited in 
this stanza of Campbell : 

By this the storm grew loud apace : 
The waterwraith was shrieking, 

And in the scowl of heav'n each face 
Grew dark as they were speaking. 

Whether I use this metre well or ill, I maintain that 
it is essentially a noble metre, a popular metre, a 
metre of great capacity. It is essentially the national 
ballad metre, for the double rhyme is an accident. 
Of course it can be applied to low, as well as to high 
subjects ; else it would not be popular : it would not be 
" of a like moral genius" to the Homeric metre, which 
was available equally for the comic poem Margites, 
for the precepts of Pythagoras, for the pious prosaic 
hymn of Cleanthes, for the driest prose of a naval 



MY EPIC METRE. 23 

catalogue,* — in short, for all early thought. Mr. 
Arnold appears to forget, though he cannot be igno- 
rant, that prose-composition is later than Homer, and 
that in the epical days every initial effort at prose 
history was carried on in Homeric doggrel by the 
Cyclic poets, who traced the history of Troy ab ovo 
in consecutive chronology. I say, he is merely inad- 
vertent, he cannot be ignorant, that the Homeric 
metre, like my metre, subserves prosaic thought with 
the utmost facility; but I hold it to be, not inad- 
vertence, but blindness, when he does not see that 
Homer's tov $ aTrafjueiftofjuevos is a line of as tho- 

* As a literary curiosity I append the sentence of a learned 
reviewer concerning this metre of Campbell. " It is a metre 
" fit for introducing anything or translating anything ; a metre 
"that nothing can elevate, or degrade, or improve, or spoil; 
" in which all subjects will sound alike. A theorem of Euclid, 
" a leading article from the ' Times,' a dialogue from the last 
" new novel, could all be reduced to it with the slightest pos- 
" sible verbal alteration." [Quite true of Greek hexameter 
or Shakspeare's line. It is a virtue in the metres.] " To such 
" a mill all would be grist that came near it, and in no grain 
" that had once passed through it would human ingenuity 
" ever detect again a characteristic quality" This writer is 
a stout maintainer that English ballad metre is the right one 
for translating Homer : only, somehow, he shuts his eyes to 
the fact that Campbell's is ballad metre I — Sad to say, ex- 
travagant and absurd assertions, like these, though anony- 
mous, can, by a parade of learning, do much damage to the 
sale of a book in verse. 



24 HOMERIC TRANSLATION. 

roughly unaffected oratio pedestris as any verse of 
Pythagoras or Horace's Satires. But on diction I 
defer to speak, till I have finished the topic of metre. 
I do not say that my measure is faultless. Every 
measure has its foible : mine has that fault which 
every uniform line must have, — it is liable to mono- 
tony. This is evaded of course as in the hexameter 
or rather as in Milton's line, — first, by varying the 
Caesura, — secondly, by varying certain feet, within nar- 
row and well understood limits, — thirdly, by irregu- 
larity in the strength of accents ; fourthly, by varying 
the weight of the unaccented syllables also. All 
these things are needed, for the mere sake of breaking 
uniformity. I will not here assert that Homer's many 
marvellous freedoms, such as i/c7){36\ov AttoWcovo?, 
were dictated by this aim, like those in the Paradise 
Lost ; but I do say, that it is most unjust, most un- 
intelligent, in critics, to produce single lines from me, 
and criticize them as rough or weak, instead of exa- 
mining them and presenting them as part of a mass. 
How would Shakspeare stand this sort of test ? nay, 
or Milton ? The metrical laws of a long poem cannot 
be the same as of a sonnet : single verses are organic 
elements of a great whole. A crag must not be cut 
like a gem. Mr. Arnold should remember Aristotle's 
maxim, that popular eloquence (and such is Homer's) 
should be broad, rough and highly coloured, like 



MANAGEMENT OF CiESURA. 25 

scene painting, not polished into delicacy like minia- 
ture. But I speak now of metre, not yet of diction. 
In any long and popular poem it is a mistake to wish 
every line to conform severely to a few types ; but to 
claim this of a translator of Homer is a doubly unin- 
telligent exaction, when Homer's own liberties trans- 
gress all bounds ; many of them being feebly disguised 
by later double spellings, as etw?, elo?, invented for 
his special accommodation. 

The Homeric verse has a rhythmical advantage 
over mine in less rigidity of caesura. Though the 
Hexameter was made out of two Doric lines, yet no 
division of sense, no pause of the voice or thought, 
is exacted between them. The chasm between two 
English verses is deeper. Perhaps, on the side of 
syntax, a four 4- three English metre drives harder 
towards monotony than Homer's own verse. For 
other reasons, it lies under a like disadvantage, com- 
pared with Milton's metre. The secondary caesuras 
possible in the four feet are of course less numerous 
than those in the five feet, and the three-foot verse 
has still less variety. To my taste, it is far more 
pleasing that the short line recur less regularly ; just 
as the parcemiac of Greek anapaests is less pleasant 
in the Aristophanic tetrameter, than when it comes 
frequent but not expected. This is a main reason 
why I prefer Scott's free metre to my own ; yet, 



26 HOMERIC TRANSLATION. 

without rhyme, I have not found how to use his 
freedom. Mr. Arnold wrongly supposes me to have 
overlooked his main and just objection to rhyming 
Homer; viz. that so many Homeric lines are intrin- 
sically made for isolation. In p. ix. of my Preface 
I called it a fatal embarrassment. But the objec- 
tion applies in its full strength only against Pope's 
rhymes, not against Walter Scott's. 

Mr. Gladstone has now laid before the public his 
own specimens of Homeric translation. Their dates 
range from 1836 to 1859. It is possible that he has 
as strong a distaste as Mr. Arnold for my version ; 
for he totally ignores the archaic, the rugged, the 
boisterous element in Homer. But as to metre, he 
gives me his full suffrage. He has lines with four 
accents, with three, and a few with two ; not one 
with five. On the whole, his metre, his cadencies, 
his varying rhymes, are those of Scott. He has more 
trochaic lines than I approve. He is truthful to 
Homer on many sides ; and (such is the delicate 
grace and variety admitted by the rhyme) his verses 
are more pleasing than mine. I do not hesitate to 
say, that if all Homer could be put before the public 
in the same style equally well with his best pieces, a 
translation executed on my principles could not live 
in the market at its side ; and certainly I should 
spare my labour. I add, that I myself prefer the 



mr. Gladstone's specimens. 27 

former piece which I quote to my own, even while I 
see his defects : for I hold that his graces, at which 
I cannot afford to aim, more than make up for his 
losses. After this confession, I frankly contrast his 
rendering of the two noblest passages with mine, that 
the reader may see, what Mr. Arnold does not show, 
my weak and strong sides. 

Gladstone, Iliad 4, 422. 

As when the billow gathers fast 

With slow and sullen roar 
Beneath the keen northwestern blast 

Against the sounding shore : 
First far at sea it rears it crest, 

Then bursts upon the beach, 
Or* with proud arch and swelling breast, 

Where headlands* outward reach, 
It smites their strength, and bellowing flings 

Its silver foam afar ; 
So, stern and thick, the Danaan kings 

And soldiers marched to war. 
Each leader gave his men the word ; 
Each warrior deep in silence heard. 
So mute they march'd, thou couldst not ken 
They were a mass of speaking men : 
And as they strode in martial might, 
Their flickering arms shot back the light. 

* I think he has mistaken the summit of the wave for a 
headland, and has made a single description into two, by 
the word Or : but I now confine my regard to the metre and 
general effect of the style. 



28 HOMERIC TRANSLATION. 

But as at even the folded sheep 

Of some rich master stand, 
Ten thousand thick their place they keep, 

And bide the milkman's hand, 
And more and more they bleat, the more 

They hear their lamblings cry ; 
So, from the Trojan host, uproar 

And din rose loud and high. 
They were a many-voiced throng : 

Discordant accents there, 
That sound from many a differing tongue, 

Their differing race declare. 
These, Mars had kindled for the fight ; 
Those, starry-ey'd Athene's might, 
And savage Terror and Affright, 
And Strife, insatiate of wars, 
The sister and the mate of Mars : 
Strife, that, a pigmy at her birth, 

By gathering rumour fed, 
Soon plants her feet upon the earth, 

And in the heav'n her head. 

I add my own rendering of the same ; somewhat 
corrected, but only in the direction of my own prin- 
ciples and against Mr. Arnold's. 

As when the surges of the deep, by Western blore uphoven, 
Against the ever-booming strand dash up in roll successive ; 
A head of waters swelleth first aloof; then under harried 
By the rough bottom, roars aloud ; till, hollow at the summit, 
Sputtering the briny foam abroad, the huge crest tumbleth over : 
So then the lines of Danai, successive and unceasing, 
In battle's close array mov'd on. To his own troops each leader 
Gave order : dumbly went the rest, (nor mightest thou discover, 



MR. GLADSTONE AND MYSELF. 29 

So vast a train of people held a voice within their bosom,) 
In silence their commanders fearing : all the ranks wellmarshall'd 
Were clad in crafty panoply, which glitter'd on their bodies. 
Meantime, as sheep within the yard of some great cattle-master, 
While the white milk is drain'd from them, stand round in number 

countless, 
And, grieved by their lambs' complaint, respond with bleat incessant ; 
So then along their ample host arose the Troian hurly. 
For neither common words spake they, nor kindred accent utter'd ; 
But mingled was the tongue of men from divers places summon'd. 
By Ares these were urged on, those by grey-ey'd Athene, 
By Fear, by Panic, and by Strife immeasurably eager, 
The sister and companion* of hero-slaying Ares, 
Who truly doth at first her crest but humble rear ; thereafter, 
Planting upon the ground her feet, her head in heaven fixeth. 

Gladstone, Iliad 19, 403. 

Hanging low his auburn head, 

Sweeping with his mane the ground, 
From beneath his collar shed, 

Xanthus, hark ! a voice hath found, 
Xanthus of the flashing feet : 
Whitearm'd Here gave the sound. 
" Lord Achilles, strong and fleet ! 
Trust us, we will bear thee home ; 
Yet cometh nigh thy day of doom : 
No doom of ours, but doom that stands 
By God and mighty Fate's commands. 
'Twas not that we were slow or slack 
Patroclus lay a corpse, his back 
All stript of arms by Trojan hands. 

* Companion, in four syllables, is in Shakspeare's style ; 
with whom habitually the termination -tion is two. 



30 HOMERIC TRANSLATION. 

The prince of gods, whom Leto bare, 
Leto with the flowing hair, 
He forward fighting did the deed, 
And gave to Hector glory's meed. 
In toil for thee, we will not shun 
Against e'en Zephyr's breath to run, 
Swiftest of winds : but all in vain : 
By god and man shalt thou be slain." 

He spake : and here, his words among, 
Erinnys bound his faltering tongue. 

Beginning with Achilles's speech, I render the pas- 
sage parallel to Gladstone thus. 

" Chesnut and Spotted I noble pair ! farfamous brood of Spry-foot ! 
In other guise now ponder ye your charioteer to rescue 
Back to the troop of Danai, when we have done with battle : 
Nor leave him dead upon the field, as late ye left Patroclus." 
But him the dapplefooted steed under the yoke accosted ; 
(And droop'd his auburn head aside straightway ; and thro' the 

collar, 
His full mane, streaming to the ground, over the yoke was scatter'd : 
Him Juno, whitearm'd goddess, then with voice of man endowed :) 
" Now and again we verily will save and more than save thee, 
Dreadful Achilles ! yet for thee the deadly day approacheth. 
Not ours the guilt ; but mighty G-od and stubborn Fate are guilty. 
Not by the slowness of our feet or dulness of our spirit 
The Troians did thy armour strip from shoulders of Patroclus ; 
But the exalted god, for whom brighthair'd Latona travail'd, 
Slew him amid the foremost ranks and glory gave to Hector. 
Now we, in coursing, pace would keep even with breeze of Zephyr, 
Which speediest they say to be : but for thyself 'tis fated 
By hand of hero and of god in mighty strife to perish." 
So much he spake : thereat his voice the Furies stopp'd for ever. 



31 

Now if any fool ask, Why does not Mr. Gladstone 
translate all Homer? any fool can reply with me, 
Because he is Chancellor of the Exchequer. A man 
who has talents and acquirements adequate to trans- 
late Homer well into rhyme, is almost certain to have 
other far more urgent calls for the exercise of such 
talents. 

So much of metre. At length I come to the topic 
of Diction, where Mr. Arnold and I are at variance 
not only as to taste, but as to the main facts of Greek 
literature. I had called Homer's style quaint and 
garrulous; and said that he rises and falls with his 
subject, being prosaic when it is tame, and low when 
it is mean. I added no proof ; for I did not dream 
that it was needed. Mr. Arnold not only absolutely 
denies all this, and denies it without proof; but adds, 
that these assertions prove my incompetence, and 
account for my total and conspicuous failure. His 
whole attack upon my diction is grounded on a pas- 
sage which I must quote at length ; for it is so con- 
fused in logic, that 1 may otherwise be thought to 
garble it, pp. 34, 35. 

" Mr. Newman speaks of the more antiquated style 
suited to this subject. Quaint ! Antiquated ! but to 
whom ? Sir Thomas Browne is quaint, and the dic- 
tion of Chaucer is antiquated: does Mr. Newman 
suppose that Homer seemed quaint to Sophocles, as 



32 HOMERIC TRANSLATION. 

Chaucer's diction seems antiquated to us ? But we 
cannot really know, I confess (!!), how Homer seemed 
to Sophocles. Well then, to those who can tell us how 
he seems to them, to the living scholar, to our only 
present witness on this matter — does Homer make on 
the Provost of Eton, when he reads him, the impres- 
sion of a poet quaint and antiquated ! does he make 
this impression on Professor Thompson or Professor 
Jowett? When Shakspeare says, 'The princes or- 
gulous/ meaning ( the proud princes/ we say, ' This 
is antiquated/ When he says of the Trojan gates, 
that they, 

With massy staples 

And corresponsive and fulfilling bolts 

Sperr up the sons of Troy, — 

we say, f This is both quaint and antiquated/ But 
does Homer ever compose in a language, which pro- 
duces on the scholar at all the same impression as 
this language which I have quoted from Shakspeare ? 
Never once. Shakspeare is quaint and antiquated in 
the lines which I have just quoted ; but Shakspeare, 
need I say it ? can compose, when he likes, when he 
is at his best, in a language perfectly simple, perfectly 
intelligible ; in a language, which, in spite of the two 
centuries and a half which part its author from us, 
stops or surprises us as little as the language of a 
contemporary. And Homer has not Shakspeare's 



mr. Arnold's dicta. 33 

variations. Homer always composes, as Shakspeare 
composes at his best. Homer is always simple and 
intelligible, as Shakspeare is often; Homer is never 
quaint and antiquated, as Shakspeare is sometimes." 

If Mr. Arnold were to lay before none but Oxford 
students assertions concerning Greek literature so 
startlingly erroneous as are here contained, it would 
not concern me to refute or protest against them. 
The young men who read Homer and Sophocles and 
Thucydides, — nay, the boys who read Homer and 
Xenophon, — would know his statements to be against 
the most notorious and elementary fact : and the 
Professors, whom he quotes, would only lose credit, 
if they sanctioned the use he makes of their names. 
But when he publishes the book for the unlearned in 
Greek, among whom I must include a great number 
of editors of magazines, I find Mr. Arnold to do a 
public wrong to literature, and a private wrong to my 
book. If I am silent, such editors may easily believe 
that I have made an enormous blunder in treating 
the dialect of Homer as antiquated. If those who 
are ostensibly scholars, thus assail my version, and 
the great majority of magazines and reviews ignore 
it, its existence can never become known to the pub- 
lic ; or it will exist not to be read, but to be despised 
without being opened : and it must perish as many 
meritorious books perish. I but lately picked up — - 



34 HOMERIC TRANSLATION. 

new, and for a fraction of its price — at a second-hand 
stall, a translation of the Iliad by T. S. Brandreth, 
Esq. (Pickering, London), into Cowper's metre, which 
is, as I judge, immensely superior to Cowper. Its 
date is 1846 : I had never heard of it. It seems to 
have perished uncriticized, unreproved, unwept, un- 
known. I do not wish my progeny to die of neglect, 
though I am willing that it should be slain in battle. 
— However, just because I address myself to the 
public unlearned in Greek, and because Mr. Arnold 
lays before them a new, paradoxical, monstrously erro- 
neous representation of facts, with the avowed object 
of staying the plague of my Homer ; I am forced to 
reply to him. 

Knowingly or unknowingly, he leads his readers to 
confuse four different questions : — 1. whether Homer 
is thoroughly intelligible to modern scholars ; 2. 
whether Homer was antiquated to the Athenians of 
Themistocles and Pericles; 3. whether he was tho- 
roughly understood by them ; 4. whether he is, abso- 
lutely, an antique poet. 

I feel it rather odd, that Mr. Arnold begins by 
complimenting me with " genuine learning," and pro- 
ceeds to appeal from me to the " living scholar." 
(What if I were bluntly to reply : " Well ! I am the 
living scholar"?) After starting the question, how 
Homer's style appeared to Sophocles, he suddenly 



homer's diction. 35 

enters a plea, under form of a concession [" I con- 
fess"!], — as a pretence for carrying the cause into a 
new court, — that of the Provost of Eton and two Pro- 
fessors, — into which court I have no admission ; and 
then, of his own will, pronounces a sentence in the 
name of these learned men. Whether they are pleased 
with this parading of their name in behalf of para- 
doxical error, I may well doubt : and until they indorse 
it themselves, T shall treat Mr. Arnold's process as a 
piece of forgery. But, be this as it may, I cannot allow 
him to " confess" for me against me : let him con- 
fess for himself that he does not know, and not for 
me, who know perfectly well, whether Homer seemed 
quaint or antiquated to Sophocles. Of course he did, 
as every beginner must know. Why, if I were to write 
mon for man, londis for lands, nestles for nests, libbard 
for leopard, muchel for much, nap for snap, green-wood 
shaw for greenwood shade, Mr. Arnold would call me 
antiquated, although every word would be intelligible. 
Can he possibly be ignorant, that this exhibits but the 
smallest part of the chasm which separates the Ho- 
meric dialect not merely from the Attic prose, but 
from iEschylus when he borrows most from Homer ? 
Every sentence of Horner was more or less antiquated 
to Sophocles, who could no more help feeling at every 
instant the foreign and antiquated character of the 
poetry, than an Englishman can help feeling the same 



36 HOMERIC TRANSLATION. 

in reading Burns's poems. Would mon, londis, lib- 
bard, withouten, muchel be antiquated or foreign, and 
are UrjXijidSao for HijXeiBov, oa-crdrio^ for ocro?, rjvre 

for ft)9, (TTiqr) for O-777, T€K€€(r(TL for T6/CVOL$, TO60-- 

Seaai for TotcrSe, 7r0A.ee? for 7roX,Xot, fieacrrjyv? for 
fieragv, ala for 77), et/3o) for Xeiffco, and five hundred 
others, — less antiquated or less foreign ? Homer has 
archaisms in every variety ; some rather recent to the 
Athenians, and carrying their minds back only to 
Solon, as (SacriXr)os for ftaaiXeox; ; others harsher, yet 
varying as dialect still, as £etvo? for £evo?, Tie for irifia, 
avOefjuoei? for dv9ir]po<$, iceicXvOi for icXve or atcovcrov, 
6afiv<;foY Oafjuwos or <rv%vb$j vaieraovTes fov vatovre? 
or olkovvt€s : others varying in the root, like a new 
language, as acfrevos for ttXovtos, i6tt)<; for fiovXrj/jua, 
777 for Segai, under which head are heaps of strange 
words, as dicr\v, ^(oo/iai, /3to?, tcrjXa, fie/juftXco/ce, yevro, 
ireirov, etc. etc. Finally comes a goodly lot of words 
which to this day are most uncertain in sense. My 
learned colleague Mr. Maiden has printed a paper on 
Homeric words, misunderstood by the later poets. 
Buttmann has written an octavo volume — (I have the 
English translation, — containing 548 pages) — to dis- 
cuss 106 illexplained Homeric words. Some of these 
Sophocles may have understood, though we do not ; 
but even if so, they were not the less antiquated to 
him. If there had been any perfect traditional un- 



homer's grammatical forms. 37 

derstanding of Homer, we should not need to deal 
with so many words by elaborate argument. On 
the face of the Iliad alone every learner must know 
how many difficult adjectives occur : I write down on 
the spur of the moment and without reference, Kprj- 
yvov, apybs, aStvo?, ar)TO<z t at^TO?, vcopoyjr, rjvoty, 
et/ViVoSe?, €\l%, eXitccoires, eWo7re? t (JuepoTres, rfkifia- 
T09, rjXeicT<Dp, alyl\i\jr, aiyaXoeis, lo/jucopos, iy^eac- 
ficopos, ireTTovesj rjdelos. If Mr. Arnold thought 
himself wiser than all the world of Greek scholars, 
he would not appeal to them, but would surely en- 
lighten us all : he would tell me, for instance, what 
eXkoires means, which Liddell and Scott do not pre- 
tend to understand; or rjBeios, of which they give 
three different explanations. But he does not write 
as claiming an independent opinion, when he flatly 
opposes me and sets me down ; he does but use sur- 
reptitiously the name of the " living scholar " against 
me. 

But I have only begun to describe the marked 
chasm often separating Homer's dialect from every- 
thing Attic. It has a wide diversity of grammatical 
inflections, far beyond such vowel changes of dialect as 
answer to our provincial pronunciations. This begins 
with new case-endings to the nouns; in -61, -6ev, -Be, 
-<£t, — proceeds to very peculiar pronominal forms, — 
and then to strange or irregular verbal inflections, in- 



38 HOMERIC TRANSLATION. 

finitives in -fiev, -fjuevcu, imperfects in -ecrice, presents 
in -a0(o, and an immensity of strange adverbs and 
conjunctions. In Thiersch's Greek Grammar, after 
the Accidence of common Greek is added as supple- 
ment an Homeric Grammar : and in it the Homeric 
Noun and Verb occupy (in the English Transla- 
tion) 206 octavo pages. Who ever heard of a Spen- 
serian Grammar ? How many pages could be need- 
ed to explain Chaucer's grammatical deviations from 
modern English ? The bare fact of Thiersch hav- 
ing written so copious a grammar will enable even 
the unlearned to understand the monstrous misre- 
presentation of Homer's dialect, on which Mr. Ar- 
nold has based his condemnation of my Homeric 
diction. Not wishing to face the plain and undeni- 
able facts which I have here recounted, Mr. Arnold 
makes a "confession" that we know nothing about 
them ! and then appeals to three learned men whether 
Homer is antiquated to them, — and expounds this 
to mean, intelligible to them ! Well : if they have 
learned modern Greek, of course they may under- 
stand it ; but Attic Greek alone will not teach it to 
them. Neither will it teach them Homer's Greek. — 
The difference of the two is in some directions so 
vast, that they may deserve to be called two languages 
as much as Portuguese and Spanish. 

Much as I have written, a large side of the argu- 



THE D1GAMMA. 39 

ment remains still untouched. The orthography of 
Homer was revolutionized in adapting it to Hellenic 
use, and in the process not only were the grammatical 
forms tampered with, but at least one consonant was 
suppressed. I am sure Mr. Arnold has heard of the 
Digamma, though he does not see it in the current 
Homeric text. By the re-establishment of this letter, 
no small addition would be made to the "oddity" of 
the sound to the ears of Sophocles. That the un- 
learned in Greek may understand this, I add, that 
what with us is written eoika, oikon, oihos, hekas, 
eorga, eeipe, elelixOrj, were with the poet wewoika, 
wikon, winos, wekas (or swekas?), weworga, eweipe, 
ewelixdrj ;* and so with very many other words, in 
which either the metre or the grammatical formation 
helps us to detect a lost consonant, and the analogy 
of other dialects or languages assures us that it is w 
which has been lost. Nor is this all ; but in certain 
words sw seems to have vanished. What in our text 
is hoi, heos, hekuros, were probably woi and swoi, weos 
and sweos, swekuros. Moreover the received spelling of 
many other words is corrupt : for instance, deos, dei- 
doika, eddeisen, periddeisas, addees. The true root 

# By corrupting the past tenses of welisso into a false simi- 
larity to the past tenses of elelizo, the old editors superimposed 
a new and false sense on the latter verb ; which still holds its 
place in our dictionaries, as it deceived the Greeks themselves. 



40 HOMERIC TRANSLATION. 

must have had the form dwe or dre or dhe. That the 
consonant lost was really w, is asserted by Benfey 
from the Sanscrit dvish. Hence the true forms are 

dweos, dedwoika, edweisen, etc Next, the initial / 

of Homer had in some words a stronger pronuncia- 
tion, whether W or %\, as in Wired, Wfocofiai, 
Wcorbs, WiraveiHD. I have met with the opinion 
that the consonant lost in anax is not w but k ; and 
that Homer's kanax is connected with English king. 
The relations of wergon, weworga, wrexai, to English 
work and wrought must strike every one ; but I do 
not here press the phenomena of the Homeric r, (al- 
though it became br in strong iEolism,) because they 
do not differ from those in Attic. The Attic forms el- 
\7](j>a, et\ey/jLcu for XeXrjcpa, etc., point to a time when 
the initial \ of the roots was a double letter. A root 
Waft would explain Homer's h'Wafte. If W* ap- 
proached to its Welsh sound, that is, to %X, it is not 
wonderful that such a pronunciation as o(f>pd Wafta* 
/jl6v was possible : but it is singular that the vBari 
XXiapa) of Attic is written XiapS in our Homeric 
text, though the metre needs a double consonant. 
Such phenomena as x\iapb$ and Xiapbs, ellftco and 

* That XX in Attic was sounded like French I mouillee, 
is judged probable by the learned writer of the article L 
(Penny Cyclop.), who urges that /xaXXoi/ is for pakiov, and 
compares cfrvWo with folio, aXXo with alio, aXX with sail. 



LOST CONSONANTS. 41 

\eif3co, Ha and fiia, et/xapfiai and e/Jb/jbope, ata and 
ryala, yivro for eXeTo, loner) and X<o%i$ with Slcokw, 
need to be reconsidered in connection. The et? aka 
akro of our Homer was perhaps el? aka adXkro : 
when W was changed into X, they compensated by 
circumflexing the vowel. I might add the query, Is 
it so certain that his Oeacov was Oedwon, and not 
Oearon, analogous to Latin dearum? But dropping 
here everything that has the slightest uncertainty, the 
mere restoration of the w where it is most necessary, 
makes a startling addition to the antiquated sound of 
the Homeric text. The reciters of Homer in Athens 
must have dropped the w, since it is never written. 
Nor indeed would Sophocles have introduced in his 
Trachinise, a Be ol cj)lXa Sd/map . . . leaving a hiatus 
most offensive to the Attics, in mere imitation of 
Homer, if he had been accustomed to hear from the 
reciters, de woi or de swoi. In other words also, as 
in ovkofxevos for 6\6/jL€vos, later poets have slavishly 
followed Homer into irregularities suggested by his 
peculiar metre. Whether Homer's dOavaros, afi- 
fjiopos . . . rose out of avOdvaTos, av\xopo^ ... is 
wholly unimportant when we remember his ~k r Kok- 
Xwvo?. 

But this leads to remark on the acuteness of Mr. 
Arnold's ear. I need not ask whether he recites the 
A differently in ? Ape?,"A/9e?, and in, %7r6\Xcov ~Atto\- 



42 HOMERIC TRANSLATION. 

Xcovos. He will not allow anything antiquated in 
Homer ; and therefore it is certain that he recites — 

aiboios re pot ecrai, <pi\e ewpe, deivos Te 
and — ovbe eoiKe — 

as they are printed, and admires the rhythm. When 
he endures with exemplary patience such hiatuses, — 
such dactyls as ee/cv, ovBee, such a spondee as pe hei, 
I can hardly wonder at his complacency in his own 
spondees " Between," " To a." He finds nothing 
wrong in kcli 7reSta Xtorevvra or iroWa \lo-<to/jL€vt). 
But Homer sang, 

<pi\e sweicvpe bweivos re — ovde wewoiice — 
/cat 7reSia WatTevvra . . . 7roXXa Wia-crofievrj. 

Mr. Arnold is not satisfied with destroying Quantity 
alone. After theoretically substituting Accent for it 
in his hexameters, he robs us of Accent also; and 
presents to us the syllables "to a," both short and 
both necessarily unaccented, for a Spondee, in a pattern 
piece seven lines long, and with ab express and gra- 
tuitous remark, that in using (C to a " for a Spondee, 
he has perhaps relied too much on accent. I hold up 
these phenomena in Mr. Arnold as a warning to all 
scholars, of the pit of delusion into which they will 
fall, if they allow themselves to talk fine about the 
" Homeric rhythm " as now heard, and the duty of a 
translator to reproduce something of it. 



HOMERIC RHYTHM. 43 

It is not merely the sound and the metre of Homer, 
which are impaired by the loss of his radical w ; in 
extreme cases the sense also is confused. Thus if a 
scholar be asked, what is the meaning of ieiararo in 
the Iliad ? he will have to reply : If it stands for 
eweisato, it means, "he was like," and is related to 
the English root wis and wit, Germ, wiss, Lat. vid ; 
but it may also mean " he went/' — a very eccentric 
Homerism, — in which case we should perhaps write 
it eyeisato, as in old English we have he yode or yede 
instead of he goed, gaed, since too the current root in 
Greek and Latin i (go) may be accepted as ye, an- 
swering to German geh, English go. — Thus two words, 
eweisato, " he was like," eyeisato, " he went/' are 
confounded in our text. I will add, that in the Ho- 
meric 

— rjvre icedvea {y)(Ti(Ti—(Tl. 2, 87) 

— Sia ivpb Se (^)eio-aro kol ttJs (H. 4, 138) 

my ear misses the consonant, though Mr. Arnold's (it 
seems) does not. If we were ordered to read dat ting 
in Chaucer for that thing, it would at first " surprise " 
us as "grotesque;" but after this objection had 
vanished, we should still feel it " antiquated." The 
confusion of thick and tick, thread and tread, may 
illustrate the possible effect of dropping the w in 
Homer. I observe that Benfey's Greek Root Lexicon 
has a list of 454 digam mated words, most of which 



44 HOMERIC TRANSLATION. 

are Homeric. But it is quite needless to press the 
argument to its full. 

If as much learning had been spent on the double \ 
and on the y and h of Homer, as on the digamma, it 
might perhaps now be conceded that we have lost, not 
one, but three or four consonants from his text. That 
X inXvco or \ova) was ever a complex sound in Greek, 
I see nothing to indicate ; hence that X, and the X, of 
Xiral, Xcapbs, seem to have been different consonants 
in Homer, as / and 11 in Welsh. As to h and y I as- 
sert nothing, except that critics appear too hastily to 
infer, that if a consonant has disappeared, it must 
needs be w. It is credible that the Greek h was 
once strong enough to stop hiatus or elision, as the 
English, and much more the Asiatic h. The later 
Greeks, after turning the character H into a vowel, 
seem to have had no idea of a consonant h in the 
middle of a word, nor any means of writing the con- 
sonant y. Since G passes through gh into the sounds 
K w i V> ff ( as i n English and German is obvious,) it 
is easy to confound them all under the compendious 
word " digamma." I should be glad to know that 
Homer's forms were as well understood by modern 
scholars as Mr. Arnold lays down. 

On his quotation from Shakspeare, I remark, 
1. "Orgulous," from French ' ' orgueilleux," is intel- 
ligible to all who know French, and is comparable to 



SHAKSPEARE AND HOMER. 45 

Sicilian words in iEschylus. 2. It is contrary to fact 
to say, that Homer has not words, and words in great 
plenty, as unintelligible to later Greeks, as " orgulous" 
to us. 3. Sperr, for Bar, as Splash for Plash, is much 
less than the diversity which separates Homer from 
the spoken Attic. What is afxiKpo^ for fxacpbs to 
compare with rjficuos for /xi/cpos ? 4. Mr. Arnold 
(as I understand him) blames Shakspeare for being 
sometimes antiquated : I do not blame him, nor yet 
Homer for the same ; but neither can I admit the 
contrast which he asserts. He says : <{ Shakspeare 
" can compose, when he is at his best, in a language 
" perfectly intelligible, in spite of the two centuries 
" and a half which part him from us. Homer has not 
" Shakspeare's variations : he is never antiquated, as 
" Shakspeare is sometimes." I certainly find the very 
same variations in Homer, as Mr. Arnold finds in 
Shakspeare. My reader unlearned in Greek might 
hastily infer from the facts just laid before him, that 
Homer is always equally strange to a purely Attic 
ear : but is not so. The dialects of Greece did indeed 
differ strongly, as broad Scotch from English ; yet as 
we know, Burns is sometimes perfectly intelligible to 
an Englishman, sometimes quite unintelligible. In 
spite of Homer's occasional wide receding from Attic 
speech, he as often comes close to it. For instance, 
in the first piece quoted above from Gladstone, the 



46 HOMERIC TRANSLATION. 

simile occuping five (Homeric) lines would almost go 
down in Sophocles, if the Tragedian had chosen to 
use the metre. There is but one out-and-out Homeric 
word in it (eTraaavTepos) : and even that is used once 
in an iEschylean chorus. There are no strange in- 
flections, and not a single digamma is sensibly lost. 
Its peculiarities are only -el for ei, ebv for bv, and Be 
re for Be, which could not embarrass the hearer as to 
the sense. I myself reproduce much the same result. 
Thus in my translation of these five lines I have the 
antiquated words blore for blast, harry for harass 
(harrow, worry), and the antiquated participle hoven 
from heave, as cloven, woven from cleave, weave. The 
whole has thus just a tinge of antiquity, as had the 
Homeric passage to the Attics, without any need of 
aid from a Glossary. But at other times the aid 
is occasionally convenient, just as in Homer or Shak- 
speare. 

Mr. Arnold plays fallaciously on the words familiar 
and unfamiliar. Homer's words may have been fami- 
liar to the Athenians (i.e. often heard), even when they 
were not understood, but, at most, were guessed at ; 
or when, being understood, they were still felt and 
known to be utterly foreign. Of course, when thus 
" familiar," they could not " surprise " the Athenians, 
as Mr. Arnold complains that my renderings surprise 
the English. Let mine be heard as Pope or even 



HOMER ABSOLUTELY ANTIQUE. 47 

Cowper has been heard, and no one will be "sur- 
" prised." 

Antiquated words are understood well by some, ill 
by others, not at all by a third class \ hence it is diffi- 
cult to decide the limits of a glossary. Mr. Arnold 
speaks scornfully of me, (he wonders with whom Mr. 
Newman can have lived,) that I use the words which 
I use, and explain those which I explain. He cen- 
sures my little Glossary, for containing three words 
which he did not know, and some others, which, he 
says, are " familiar to all the world." It is clear, he 
will never want a stone to throw at me. I suppose 
I am often guilty of keeping low company. I have 
found ladies — whom no one would guess to be so ill- 
educated, — who yet do not distinctly know what lusty 
means ; but have an uncomfortable feeling that it is 
very near to lustful ; and understand grisly only in 
the sense of grizzled, grey. Great numbers mistake 
the sense of Buxom, Imp, Dapper, deplorably. I no 
more wrote my Glossary than my translation for per- 
sons so highly educated as Mr. Arnold. 

But I must proceed to remark : Homer might have 
been as unintelligible to Pericles, as was the court 
poet of king Croesus, and yet it might be highly im- 
proper to translate him into an old English dialect ; 
namely, if he had been the typical poet of a logical 
and refined age. Here is the real question; — is he 



48 HOMERIC TRANSLATION. 

absolutely antique, or only antiquated relatively, as 
Euripides is now antiquated? A modern Greek 
statesman, accomplished for every purpose of modern 
business, might find himself quite perplexed by the 
infinitives, the numerous participles, the optatives, 
the datives, — by the particle av, — and by the whole 
syntax of Euripides, as also by many special words ; 
but this would never justify us in translating Euri- 
pides into any but a most refined style. Was Homer 
of this class ? I say, that he not only was antiquated, 
relatively to Pericles, but is also absolutely antique, 
being the poet of a barbarian age. Antiquity in 
poets is not (as Horace stupidly imagines in the argu- 
ment of the horse's tail) a question of years, but of 
intrinsic qualities. Homer sang to a wholly unfas- 
tidious audience, very susceptible to the marvellous, 
very unalive to the ridiculous, capable of swallow- 
ing with reverence the most grotesque conceptions. 
Hence nothing is easier than to turn Homer to ridi- 
cule. The fun which Lucian made of his mythology, 
a rhetorical critic like Mr. Arnold could make of his 
diction, if he understood it as he understands mine. 
He takes credit to himself for not ridiculing me ; and 
is not aware, that I could not be like Homer without 
being easy to ridicule. An intelligent child is the 
second-best reader of Homer. The best of all is a 
scholar of highly masculine taste; the worst of all 



QUAINTNESS OF CHAPMAN. 49 

is a fastidious and refined man, to whom everything 
quaint seems ignoble and contemptible. 

I might have supposed that Mr. Arnold thinks 
Homer to be a polished drawing-room poet, like 
Pope, when I read in him this astonishing sentence, 
p. 33. "Search the English language for a word 
" which does not apply to Homer, and you could not 
" fix on a better word than quaint." But I am taken 
aback at finding him praise the diction of Chapman's 
translation in contrast to mine. Now I never open 
Chapman, without being offended at his pushing 
Homer's quaintness most unnecessarily into the gro- 
tesque. Thus in Mr. Gladstone's first passage above, 
where Homer says that the sea "sputters out the 
u foam," Chapman makes it, " all her back in bristles 
set, spits every way her foam," obtruding what may 
remind one of a cat or stoat. I hold sputter to be 
epical,* because it is strong; but spit is feeble and 
mean. In passing, I observe that the universal praise 
given to Chapman as " Homeric " (a praise which I 
have too absolutely repeated, perhaps through false 
shame of depreciating my only rival) is a testimony 
to me that I rightly appreciate Homeric style; for 

* Men who can bear " belch " in poetry, nowadays pretend 
that " spntter " is indelicate. They find Homer's a-noirrvei to 
be " elegant," but sputter — not ! " No one would guess from 
" Mr. Newman's coarse phrases how elegant is Homer " ! ! 

E 



50 HOMERIC TRANSLATION. 

my style is Chapman's softened, purged of conceits 
and made far more melodious. Mr. Arnold leaves 
me to wonder, how, with his disgust at me, he can 
avoid feeling tenfold disgust at Chapman; and to 
wonder also what he means, by so blankly contradict- 
ing my statement that Homer is quaint ; and why he 
so vehemently resents it. He does not vouchsafe to 
me or to his readers one particle of disproof or of ex- 
planation. 

I regard it as quaint in Homer to call Juno white- 
arm 'd goddess and large-ey'd. (I have not rendered 
/3oa>7Tfc9 ox-ey'd, because in a case of doubt I shrank 
to obtrude anything so grotesque to us.) It is quaint 
to say, " the lord of bright-haired Juno lightens," for 
" it lightens;" or "my heart in my shaggy bosom is 
" divided," for, " I doubt :" quaint to call waves wet, 
milk white, blood dusky, horses singlehoofed, a hero's 
hand broad, words winged, Vulcan Lobfoot (KuXXo- 
7toBlcov), a maiden fair-ankled, the Greeks wellgreav'd, 
a spear longshadowy , battle and council man-ennobling, 
one's knees dear, and many other epithets. Mr. 
Arnold most gratuitously asserts that the sense of 
these had evaporated to the Athenians. If that were 
true, it would not signify to this argument. Aai- 
povios (possessed by an elf or daemon) so lost its 
sense in Attic talk, that although iEschylus has it 
in its true meaning, some college tutors (I am told) 



QUAINTNESS OF HOMER. 51 

render w Saifiovie in Plato, " my very good sir ! ' 
This is surely no good reason for mistranslating the 
word in Homer. If Mr. Arnold could prove (what 
he certainly cannot) that Sophocles had forgotten the 
derivation of ii>/cvr)/j,2$es and iv/jL/jLeXLrjs, and under- 
stood by the former nothing but " full armed " and 
by the latter (as he says) nothing but " warlike," this 
would not justify his blame of me for rendering the 
words correctly. If the whole Greek nation by long 
familiarity had become inobservant of Homer's " odd- 
ities/' (conceding this for the moment,) that also 
would be no fault of mine. That Homer is extremely 
peculiar, even if the Greeks had become deadened to 
the sense of it, the proof on all sides is overpowering. 
It is very quaint to say, " the outwork (or rampart) 
" of the teeth" instead of " the lips." If Mr. Arnold 
will call it " portentous" in my English, let him pro- 
duce some shadow of reason for denying it to be por- 
tentous in Greek. Many phrases are so quaint as to 
be almost untranslatable, as fArjarcop <J)6/3olo (deviser 
of fear ?) firjo-Toop avTrjs (deviser of outcry ?) : others 
are quaint to the verge of being comical, as to call a 
man an equipoise (ardXavTos) to a god, and to praise 
eyes for having a curl in them.*" It is quaint to make 

* In a Note to my translation (overlooked by more than 
one critic) I have explained curl-eyd, carefully, but not very 
accurately perhaps ; as I had not before me the picture of the 

E 2 



52 HOMERIC TRANSLATION. 

Juno call Jupiter alvorare (grimmest? direst ?), whe- 
ther she is in good or bad humour with him, and to 
call a Vision ghastly, when it is sent with a pleasant 
message. It is astonishingly quaint to tell how many 
oxen every fringe of Athene's aegis was worth. — It is 
quaint to call Patroclus " a great simpleton/' for not 
foreseeing that lie would lose his life in rushing to 
the rescue of his countrymen. (I cannot receive Mr. 
Arnold's suggested Biblical correction " Thou fool !" 
which he thinks grander : first, because grave moral 
rebuke is utterly out of place ; secondly, because the 
Greek cannot mean this ; — it means infantine sim- 
plicity, and has precisely the colour of the word which 
I have used.) — It is quaint to say: " Patroclus kindled 
a great fire, godlike man ! " or, "Automedon held up 
the meat, divine Achilles slic'd it : " quaint to address 
a young friend as " Oh* pippin !" or " Oh softheart !" 
or " Oh pet !" whichever is the true translation. It 
is quaint to compare Ajax to an ass whom boys are 
belabouring, Ulysses to a pet ram, Agamemnon in 

Hindoo lady to which I referred. The whole upper eyelid, 
when open, may be called the curl ; for it is shaped like a buf- 
falo's horns. This accounts for eXiKofiXecfrapos, " having a curly 
eyelid." 

* I thought I had toned it down pretty well, in rendering 
it " O gentle friend !" Mr. Arnold rebukes me for this, with- 
out telling me what I ought to say, or what is my fault. One 
thing is certain, that the Greek is most odd and peculiar. 



QUAINTNESS OF HOMER. 53 

two lines to three gods and in the third line to a bull ; 
the Myrmidons to wasps, Achilles to a grampus cha- 
sing little fishes, Antilochus to a wolf which kills a 
dog and runs away, Menelaus striding over Patroclus's 
body to a heifer defending her firstborn. It is quaint 
to say that Menelaus was as brave as a bloodsucking 
fly, that Agamemnon's sobs came thick as flashes of 
lightning; and that the Trojan mares, while running, 
groaned like overflowing rivers. All such similes 
come from a mind quick to discern similarities, but 
very dull to feel incongruities ; unaware therefore that 
it is on a verge where the sublime easily turns into 
the ludicrous ; — a mind and heart inevitably quaint 
to the very core. What is it in Vulcan, — when he 
would comfort his mother under Jupiter's threat, — to 
make jokes about the severe mauling which he him- 
self formerly received, and his terror lest she should 
be now beaten ? Still more quaint, (if rollicking is 
not the word,) is the address by which Jupiter tries to 
ingratiate himself with Juno : viz. he recounts to her 
all his unlawful amours, declaring that in none of 
them was he so smitten as now. I have not enough 
of the ryevvalos evrjOeia, the barbarian simplehearted- 
ness, needed by a reader of Homer, to get through 
this speech with gravity. — What shall I call it, — cer- 
tainly much worse than quaint, — that the poet adds : 
Jupiter was more enamoured than at his stolen em- 



54 HOMERIC TRANSLATION. 

brace in their first bed "secretly from their dear 
"parents"? But to develop Homer's inexhaustible 
quaintnesses, of which Mr. Arnold denies the exist- 
ence, seems to me to need a long treatise. It is not 
to be expected, that one who is blind to superficial 
facts so very prominent as those which I have re- 
counted, should retain any delicate perception of the 
highly coloured, intense, and very eccentric diction of 
Homer, even if he has ever understood it, which he 
forces me to doubt. He sees nothing " odd" in k uvo? 
KaKOfirj^dvoVj or in /cvvofivia, " thou dogfly " ! He 
replaces to his imagination the flesh and blood of the 
noble barbarian by a dim feeble spiritless outline. 

I have not adduced, in proof of Homer's quaintness, 
the monstrous simile given to us in Iliad 13, 754 ; 
viz. Hector " darted forward screaming like a snowy 
" mountain, and flew through the Trojans and allies :" 
for I cannot believe that the poet wrote anything so 
absurd. Rather than admit this, I have suggested 
that the text is corrupt, and that for 6 pel vifyoevTi we 
should read opvew Ovovti, — " darted forth screaming 
" like a raging bird." Yet, as far as I know, I am 
the first man that has here impugned the text. Mr. 
Brandreth is faithful in his rendering, except that he 
says shouting for screaming : 

" He said ; and, like a snowy mountain, rush'd 
" Shouting ; and flew through Trojans and allies." 



HOMER PICTURESQUE. 55 

Chapman, Cowper, and Pope strain and twist the 
words to an impossible sense, putting in something 
about white plume, which they fancy suggested a 
snowy mountain ; but they evidently accept the Greek 
as it stands, unhesitatingly. I claim this phenomenon 
in proof that to all commentators and interpreters 
hitherto Homer's quaintness has been such an axiom, 
that they have even acquiesced unsuspiciously in an 
extravagance which goes far beyond oddity. More- 
over the reader may augur by my opposite treatment 
of the passage, with what discernment Mr. Arnold 
condemns me of obtruding upon Homer gratuitous 
oddities which equal the conceits of Chapman. 

But, while thus vindicating Quaintness as an essen- 
tial quality of Homer, do I regard it as a weakness 
to be apologized for ? Certainly not ; for it is a con- 
dition of his cardinal excellencies. He could not 
otherwise be Picturesque as he is. So volatile is his 
mind, that what would be Metaphor in a more logical 
and cultivated age, with him riots in Simile which 
overflows its banks. His similes not merely go be- 
yond* the mark of likeness ; in extreme cases they 
even turn into contrariety. If he were not so carried 

* In the noble simile of the sea-tide, quoted p. 28 above, 
only the two first of its five lines are to the purpose. Mr. 
Gladstone, seduced by rhyme, has so tapered off the point of 
the similitude, that only a microscopic reader will see it. 



56 HOMERIC TRANSLATION. 

away by his illustration", as to forget what he is illus- 
trating, (which belongs to a quaint mind,) he would 
never paint for us such full and splendid pictures. 
Where a logical later poet would have said that Me- 

nelaus 

With eagle-eye survey'd the field, 

the mere metaphor contenting him ; Homer says : 

Gazing around on every side, in fashion of an eagle, 
Which, of all heaven's fowl, they say, to scan the earth is keenest i 
Whose eye, when loftiest he hangs, not the swift hare escapeth, 
Lurking amid a leaf-clad hush : but straight at it he souseth, 
Unerring ; and with crooked gripe doth quickly rieve its spirit. 

I feel this long simile to be a disturbance of the 
logical balance, such as belongs to the lively eye of 
the savage, whose observation is intense, his concen- 
tration of reasoning powers feeble. Without this, we 
should never have got anything so picturesque. 

Homer never sees things in the same proportions as 
we see them. To omit his digressions, and what I 
may call his " impertinencies," in order to give to his 
argument that which Mr. Arnold is pleased to call the 
proper " balance/' is to value our own logical minds, 
more than his picturesque* but illogical mind. 

* It is very singular that Mr. G-ladstone should imagine 
such a poet to have no eye for colour. I totally protest 
against his turning Homer's paintings into leadpeneil dra^A-- 
ings. I believe that yXavKos is grey (silvergreen), x^P "^ blue ; 



NOVELTY OF EXPRESSION. 57 



Mr. Arnold says I am not quaint, but grotesque, 
in my rendering of kvvos KaKoy>,r\yavov. I do not 
hold the phrase to be quaint : to me it is excessively 
coarse. When Jupiter calls Juno " a bitch/' of course 
he means a snarling cur ; hence my rendering, "vixen" 
(or she-fox), is there perfect, since we say vixen of an 
irascible woman. But Helen had no such evil tem- 
pers, and beyond a doubt she meant to ascribe im- 
purity to herself. I have twice committed a pious 
fraud by making her call herself "a vixen," where 
" bitch " is the only faithful rendering; and Mr. Ar- 
nold, instead of thanking me for throwing a thin veil 
over Homer's deformity, assails me for my phrase as 
intolerably grotesque. 

He further forbids me to invent new compound ad- 
jectives, as fair-thron'd, rill-bestream'd ; because they 
strike us as new, though Homer's epithets (he says) 
did not so strike the Greeks : hence they derange at- 
tention from the main question. I hold this doctrine 
of his (conceding his fact for a moment) to be de- 
structive of all translation whatever, into prose or 
poetry. When Homer tells us that Achilles's horses 
were munching lotus and parsley, Pope renders it by 

and that irpaaivos, " leek-colour," was too mean a word for 
any poets, early or late, to use for " green ;" therefore x^pos 
does dutj? for it. Kdfia iropcpvpeov is surely " the purple wave," 
and loeidea tvovtov ''the violet sea." 



58 HOMERIC TRANSLATION. 

" the horses grazed," and does not say on what. 
Using Mr. Arnold's principles, he might defend him- 
self by arguing : " The Greeks, being familiar with 
" such horsefood, were not struck by it as new, as my 
" reader would be. I was afraid of telling him what 
" the horses were eating, lest it should derange the 
" balance of his mind, and injuriously divert him from 
" the main idea of the sentence." But, I find, rea- 
ders are indignant on learning Pope's suppression : 
they feel that he has defrauded them of a piece of in- 
teresting information. — In short, how can an English- 
man read any Greek composition and be affected by 
it as Greeks were? In a piece of Euripides my 
imagination is caught by many things, which he never 
intended or calculated for the prominence which they 
actually get in my mind. This or that absurdity in 
mythology, which passed with him as matter of course, 
may monopolize my main attention. Our minds are 
not passive recipients of this or that poet's influence ; 
but the poet is the material on which our minds 
actively work. If an unlearned reader thinks it very 
" odd" of Homer (the first time he hears it) to call 
Aurora " fair-thron'd," so does a boy learning Greek 
think it odd to call her evOpovos. Mr. Arnold ought 
to blot every odd Homeric epithet out of his Greek 
Homer (or never lend the copy to a youthful learner) 
if he desire me to expunge " fair-thron'd" from the 



NOVELTY OF THOUGHT. 59 

translation. Nay, I think he should conceal that the 
Morning was esteemed as a goddess, though she had 
no altars or sacrifice. It is all odd. But that is just 
why people want to read an English Homer, — to 
know all his oddities, exactly as learned men do. He 
is the phenomenon to be studied. His peculiarities, 
pleasant or unpleasant, are to be made known, pre- 
cisely because of his great eminence and his substan- 
tial deeply seated worth. Mr. Arnold writes like a 
timid biographer, fearful to let too much of his friend 
come out. So much as to the substance. As to 
mere words, here also I hold the very reverse of Mr. 
Arnold's doctrine. I do not feel free to translate 
ovpavofirjfcr]^ by "heaven-kissing," precisely because 
Shakspeare has used the last word. It is his pro- 
perty, as ivKvrjfjblSe^, ivfifjueXir}?, Kvhidveipa, etc., are 
Homer's property. I could not use it without being 
felt to quote Shakspeare, which would be highly in- 
appropriate in a Homeric translation. But if nobody 
had ever yet used the phrase "heaven-kissing" (or if 
it were current without any proprietor) then I should 
be quite free to use it as a rendering of ovpavo/j,rj/cr}$. 
I cannot assent to a critic killing the vital powers of 
our tongue. If Shakspeare might invent the com- 
pound " heaven-kissing," or " man-ennobling," so 
might Willi am "Wordsworth or Matthew Arnold; and 
so might I. Inspiration is not dead, nor yet is the 
English language. 



60 HOMERIC TRANSLATION. 

Mr. Arnold is slow to understand what I think very 
obvious. Let me then put a case. What if I were 
to scold a missionary for rendering in Feejee the 
phrase "kingdom of heaven" and "Lamb of God" 
accurately ; also " saints " and other words charac- 
teristic of the New Testament ? I might urge against 
him : " This and that sounds very odd to the Fee- 
"jees: that cannot be right, for it did not seem odd 
" to the Nicene bishops. The latter had forgotten 
"that ftaortkela meant ' kingdom ;' they took the 
"phrase ' kingdom of God* collectively to mean ' the 
" Church/ The phrase did not surprise them. As 
" to ' Lambs/ the Feejees are not accustomed to 
" sacrifice, and cannot be expected to know of them- 
" selves what c Lamb of God' means, as Hebrews 
" did. The courtiers of Constantine thought it very 
" natural to be called ayioi, for they were accustomed 
" to think every baptized person ayio? ; but to the 
" baptized courtiers of Feejee it really seems very odd 
" to be called saints. You disturb the balance of 
"their judgment." 

The missionary might reply : " You seem to be 
" ashamed of the oddities of the Gospel. I am not. 
" They grow out of its excellences and cannot be 
" separated. By avoiding a few eccentric phrases you 
" will do little to remove the deep-seated eccentricity 
" of its very essence. Odd and eccentric it will re- 



61 

" main, unless you despoil it of its heart, and reduce 
"it to a fashionable philosophy." And just so do I 
reply to Mr. Arnold. The Homeric style (whether 
it be that of an individual or of an age) is peculiar, 
is " odd," if Mr. Arnold like the word, to the very 
core. Its eccentricities in epithet are mere efflores- 
cences of its essential eccentricity, If Homer could 
cry out to us, I doubt not he would say, as Oliver 
Cromwell to the painter, " Paint me just I am, wart 
" and all :" but if the true Homer could reappear, I 
am sure Mr. Arnold would start from him just as a 
bishop of Rome from a fisherman apostle. If a trans- 
lator of the Bible honours the book by his close ren- 
dering of its characteristics, however " odd," so do I 
honour Homer by the same. Those characteristics, 
the moment I produce them, Mr. Arnold calls ignoble. 
Well : be it so ; but I am not to blame for them. 
They exist, whether Mr. Arnold likes them or not. 

I will here observe that he bids me paraphrase 
TavinreirXos (trailing-robed) into something like, " Let 
"gorgeous Tragedy With sceptred pall come sweeping 
by." I deliberately judge, that to paraphrase an 
otiose epithet is the very worst thing that can be 
done : to omit it entirely would be better. I object 
even to Mr. Gladstone's 

. . . . whom Leto bare, 
Leto with the flowing hair. 



62 HOMERIC TRANSLATION. 

For the repetition overdoes the prominence of the 
epithet. Still more extravagant is Mr. Arnold in 
wishing me to turn "single-hoofed horses" into 
" something which as little surprises us as ' Gallop 
" l apace, you fiery-footed steeds : ; "p. 90. To repro- 
duce Shakspeare would be in any case a " surprising " 
mode of translating Homer : but the principle which 
changes " single-hoofed " into a different epithet 
which the translator thinks better, is precisely that 
which for more than two centuries has made nearly 
all English translation worthless. To throw the poet 
into your crucible, and bring out old Pelias young, 
is not a hopeful process. I had thought, the manly 
taste of this day had outgrown the idea that a trans- 
lator's business is to melt up the old coin and stamp 
it with a modern image. I am wondering that I should 
have to write against such notions : I would not take 
the trouble, only that they come against me from an 
Oxford Professor of Poetry. 

At the same time, his doctrine, as I have said, goes 
far beyond compound epithets. Whether I say 
" motley-helmed Hector" or " Hector of the motley 
"helm," "silver-footed Thetis" or "Thetis of the 
"silver foot," "man-ennobling combat" or "combat 
" which ennobles man," the novelty is so nearly on a 
par, that he cannot condemn one and justify the other 
on this score. Even Pope falls far short of the false 



CHESNUT AND SPOTTED. 63 

taste which would plane down every Homeric promi- 
nence : for he prizes an elegant epithet like " silver- 
" footed/' however new and odd. 

From such a Homer as Mr. Arnold's specimens 
and principles would give us, no one could learn any- 
thing ; no one could have any motive for reading the 
translation. He smooths down the stamp of Homer's 
coin, till nothing is left even for microscopic exami- 
nation. When he forbids me (p. 90) to let my reader 
know that Homer calls horses " single-hoofed/' of 
course he would suppress also the epithets " white 
" milk/' ".dusky blood/' " dear knees/' ' c dear life/' 
etc. His process obliterates everything characteristic, 
great or small. 

Mr. Arnold condemns my translating certain names 
of horses. He says (p.. 55): "Mr. Newman calls Xan- 
" thus Chesnut ; as he calls Balius Spotted and Pod- 
" arga Spryfoot : which is as if a Frenchman were 
" to call Miss Nightingale Madlle. Rossignol, or Mr. 
" Bright M . Clair" He is very wanting in discrimi- 
nation. If I had translated Hector into Possessor or 
Agamemnon into Highmind, his censure would be 
just. A Miss White may be a brunette, a Miss 
Brown may be a blonde : we utter the proper names 
of men and women without any remembrance of 
their intrinsic meaning. But it is different with many 
names of domestic animals. We never call a dog 



61< HOMERIC TRANSLATION. 

Spot, unless he is spotted ; nor without consciousness 
that the name expresses his peculiarity. No one would 
give to a black horse the name Chesnut; nor, if he 
had called a chesnut horse by the name Chesnut, would 
he ever forget the meaning of the name while he used 
it. The Greeks called a chesnut horse xanthos and 
a spotted horse balios ; therefore, until Mr. Arnold 
proves the contrary, I believe that they never read 
the names of Achilles' s two horses without a sense of 
their meaning. Hence the names ought to be trans- 
lated ; while Hector and Laomedon ought not. The 
same reasoning applies to Podarga, though I do not 
certainly understand a/370?. I have taken it to mean 
sprightly. 

Mr. Arnold further asserts, that Homer is never 
"garrulous." Allowing that too many others agree 
with me, he attributes our error to giving too much 
weight to a sentence in Horace ! I admire Horace 
as an ode- writer, but I do not revere him as a critic, 
any more than as a moral philosopher. I say that Ho- 
mer is garrulous., because I see and feel it. — Mr. Ar- 
nold puts me into a most unwelcome position. I have 
a right to say, I have some enthusiasm for Homer. 
In the midst of numerous urgent calls of duty and 
taste, I devoted every possible quarter of an hour for 
two years and a half to translate the Iliad, toiling un- 
remittingly in my vacations and in my walks, and 



GARRULITY OF HOMER. 65 

going to large expenses of money, in order to put the 
book before the unlearned; and this, though I am 
not a Professor of Poetry nor even of Greek. Yet 
now I am forced to appear as Homer's disparager 
and accuser ! But if Homer were always a poet, he 
could not be, what he is, so many other things be- 
side poet. As the Egyptians paint in their tombs 
processes of art, not because they are beautiful or 
grand, but from a mere love of imitating ; so Homer 
narrates perpetually from a mere love of chatting. In 
how thoroughly Egyptian a way does he tell the pro- 
cess of cutting up an ox and making kebab ; the pro- 
cess of bringing a boat to anchor and carefully put- 
ting by the tackle ; the process of taking out a shawl 
from a chest, where it lies at the very bottom ! With 
what glee he repeats the secret talk of the gods ; and 
can tell all about the toilet of Juno. Every particular 
of trifling actions comes out with him, as, the opening 
of a door or box with a key. — He tells who made 
Juno's earrings or veil or the shield of Ajax — the his- 
tory of Agamemnon's breastplate — and in what detail 
a hero puts on his pieces of armour. I would not 
press the chattiness of Pandarus, Glaucus, Nestor, 
iEneas, in the midst of battle ; I might press his de- 
scription of wounds. Indeed I have said enough, and 
more than enough, against Mr. Arnold's novel, un- 
supported paradoxical assertion. — But this is con- 



66 HOMERIC TRANSLATION. 

nected with another subject. I called Homer's man- 
ner " direct i" Mr. Arnold (if I understand) would 
supersede this by his own epithet "rapid." But I 
cannot admit the exchange : Homer is often the oppo- 
site of rapid. Amplification is his characteristic, as 
it must be of every improvisatore, every popular ora- 
tor : condensation indeed is improper for anything 
but written style, — written to be read privately. But 
I regard as Homer's worst defect, his lingering over 
scenes of endless carnage and painful wounds. He 
knows to half an inch where one hero hits another 
and how deep. They arm : they approach : they en- 
counter : we have to listen to stereotype details again 
and again. Such a style is anything but " rapid." 
Homer's garrulity often leads him into it ; yet he can 
do far better, as in a part of the fight over Patroclus's 
body, and other splendid passages. 

Garrulity often vents itself in expletives. Mr. 
Arnold selects for animadversion this line of mine 
(P- 41) - 

"A thousand fires along the plain, I say, that night were 
gleaming." 

He says : " This may be the genuine style of ballad 
" poetry, but it is not the style of Homer." I reply ; 
my use of expletives is moderate indeed compared to 
Homer's. Mr. Arnold writes, as if quite unaware 



homer's expletives. 67 

that such words as the intensely prosaic dp a, and its 
abbreviations ap, pa, with toc, t€, 8rj, fidXa, 97, 77 pa vv, 
nrep, overflow in epic style ; and that a pupil who has 
mastered the very copious stock of Attic particles, 
is taken quite aback by the extravagant number in 
Homer. Our expletives are generally more offensive, 
because longer. My principle is, to admit only such 
expletives as add energy, and savour of antiquity. To 
the feeble expletives of mean ditties I am not prone. 
I once heard from an eminent counsellor the first 
lesson of young lawyers, in the following doggrel : 

He who holds his lands in fee, 

Need neither quake nor quiver : 
For I humbly conceive, look ye, do ye see ? 

He holds his lands for ever. 

The " humbly conceiving " certainly outdoes Homer. 
Yet if the poet had chosen (as he might have chosen) 
to make Polydamas or Glaucus say : 

"Octtls enerpdcpdr] refievos rricrTei fiaaiXrjos, 

Cprjfii tol, ovtos dvrjp ovt ap rpepei ovre (poftelrai' 

drj /xaXa yap pa eas Kparioi kcv eaaiev dpovpas : 

I rather think the following would be a fair prose 
rendering: "Whoso hath been entrusted with a de- 
" mesne under pledge with the king ; (I tell you,) this 
" man neither trembleth (you see) nor feareth : for 
" (look ye !) he (verily) may hold (you see) his lands 
" for ever." 

f 2 



68 HOMERIC TRANSLATION. 

Since Mr. Arnold momentarily appeals to me on 
the chasm between Attic and Homeric Greek, I turn 
the last piece into a style far less widely separated from 
modern English than Homer from Thucydides. 

Dat mon, quhich kauldeth Kyngis-af 

Londis yn feo, niver 
(I tell 'e) feereth aught ; sith hee 

Doth hauld hys londis yver. 

I certainly do not recommend this style to a trans- 
lator, yet it would have its advantage. Even with a 
smaller change of dialect it would aid us over Helen's 
self piercing denunciation, — " approaching to Chris- 
" tian penitence," as some have judged it. 



Quoth she, I am a gramsome bitch, 
If woman bitch may bee. 



But in behalf of the poet I must avow : when one 
considers how dramatic he is, it is marvellous how 
little in him can offend. For this very reason he is 
above needing tender treatment from a translator, 
but can bear faithful rendering, not only better than 
Shakspeare but better than Pindar or Sophocles. 

When Mr. Arnold denies that Homer is ever pro- 
saic or homely, his own specimens of translation put 
me into despair of convincing him ; for they seem to 
me a very anthology of prosaic flatness. Phrases, 
which are not in themselves bad, if they were elevated 



MR. ARNOLD PROSAIC. 69 

by something in the syntax or rhythm distinguishing 
them from prose, become in him prose out-and-out. 
" To Peleus why did we give you, to a mortal ?" " In 
" the plain there were kindled a thousand fires j by 
" each one there sate fifty men." [At least he might 
have left out the expletive.] "By their chariots 
"stood the steeds, and champed the white barley; 
" while their masters sate by the fire and waited for 
" morning." " Us, whose portion for ever Zeus has 
" made it, from youth right up to age, to be winding 
" skeins of grievous wars, till every soul of us perish." 
The words which I here italicize, seem to me below 
noble ballad. What shall I say of "I bethink me 
" what the Trojan men and Trojan women might 
" murmur." " Sacred Troy shall go to destruction." 
" Or bear pails to the well of Messeis." " See, the 
" wife of Hector, that great pre-eminent captain of the 
" horsemen of Troy, in the day they fought for their 
" city :" for, " who was captain in the day on which — ." 
" Let me be dead and the earth be mounded (?) above 
" me, ere I hear thy cries, and thy captivity* told of" 
" By no slow pace or want of swiftness of oursf did 

* He pares down eAK^fyioio, (the dragging away of a woman 
by the hair,) into " captivity !" Better surely is my "ignoble" 
version : " Ere-that I see thee dragg'd away, and hear thy 
shriek of anguish." 

t He means ours for two syllables. " Swiftness of ours" is 
surely ungrammatical. " A galley of my own'— one of my 



70 HOMERIC TRANSLATION. 

" the Trojans obtain to strip the arms of Patroclus." 
" Here I am destined to perish, far from my father 
" and mother dear ; for all that, I will not/' etc. 
" Dare they not enter the fight, or stand in the coun- 
" cil of heroes, all for fear of the shame and the taunts 
"my crime has awakened?" One who regards all 
this to be high poetry, — emphatically " noble," — may 
well think rbv 8' aTrafieifio/jLevos or " with him there 
" came forty black galleys," or the broiling of the 
beef collops, to be such. When Mr. Arnold regards 
u no want of swiftness of ours ;" " for all that," in the 
sense of nevertheless ; " all for fear," i.e. because of 
the fear ; — not to be prosaic : — my readers, however ig- 
norant of Greek, will dispense with further argument 
from me. Mr. Arnold's inability to discern prose in 
Greek is not to be trusted. 

But I see something more in this phenomenon. 
Mr. Arnold is an original poet ; and, as such, cer- 
tainly uses a diction far more elevated than he here 
puts forward to represent Homer. He calls his Ho- 
meric diction plain and simple. Interpreting these 
words from the contrast of Mr. Arnold's own poems, 
I claim his suffrage as on my side, that Homer is 

own galleys ; but " a father of mine," is absurd, since each 
has but one father. I confess I have myself been seduced 
into writing " those two eyes of his," to avoid " those his two 
" eyes" : but I have since condemned and altered it. 



71 

often in a style much lower than what the moderns 
esteem to be poetical. But I protest, that he carries 
it very much too far, and levels the noblest down to 
the most negligent style of Homer. The poet is not 
always so "ignoble," as the unlearned might infer 
from my critic's specimens. He never drops so low 
as Shakspeare ; yet if he were as sustained as Virgil 
, or Milton, he would with it lose his vast superiority 
over these, his rich variety. That the whole first book 
of the Iliad is pitched lower than the rest, though it 
has vigorous descriptions, is denoted by the total ab- 
sence of simile in it : for Homer's kindling is always 
indicated by simile. The second book rises on the 
first, until the catalogue of ships, which (as if to atone 
for its flatness) is ushered in by five consecutive 
similes. In the third and fourth books the poet 
continues to rise, and almost culminates in the fifth ; 
but then seems to restrain himself, lest nothing 
grander be left for Achilles. Although I do not be- 
lieve in a unity of authorship between the Odyssey 
and the Iliad, yet in the Iliad itself I see such unity, 
that I cannot doubt its negligences to be from art. 
(The monstrous speech of Nestor in the 11th book is 
a case by itself. About 100 lines have perhaps been 
added later, for reasons other than literary.) I ob- 
serve that just before the poet is about to bring out 
Achilles in his utmost splendour, he has three-quarters 



72 HOMERIC TRANSLATION. 

of a book comparatively tame, with a ridiculous legend 
told by Agamemnon in order to cast his own sins upon 
Pate. If Shakspeare introduces coarse wrangling, 
buffoonery, or mean superstition, no one claims or 
wishes this to be in a high diction or tragic rhythm ; 
and why should any one wish such a thing from 
Homer or Homer's translator ? I find nothing here 
in the poet to apologize for ; but much cause for in- 
dignation, when the unlearned public is misled by 
translators or by critics to expect delicacy and ele- 
gance out of place. But I beg the unlearned to judge 
for himself whether Homer can have intended such 
lines as the following for poetry, and whether I am 
bound to make them any better than I do. 

Then visiting he urged each man with words, 
Mesthles and Glaucus and Medon and Thereilochus 
And Asteropseus and Deisenor and Hippothoiis 
And Phorkys and Chromius and Ennomus the augur. 

He has lines in plenty as little elevated. If they came 
often in masses, it would be best to translate them 
into avowed prose : but since gleams of poetry break 
out amid what is flattest, I have no choice but to imi- 
tate Homer in retaining a uniform, but easy and un- 
pretending metre. Mr. Arnold calls my metre " slip- 
" shod :" if it can rise into grandeur when needful, 
the epithet is a praise. 

Of course I hold the Iliad to be generally noble and 



73 

grand. Very many of the poet's conceptions were 
grand to him, mean to us : especially is he mean and 
absurd in scenes of conflict between the gods. Be- 
sides, he is disgusting and horrible occasionally in 
word and thought ; as when Hecuba wishes to " cling 
" on Achilles and eat up his liver ;" when (as Jupiter 
says) Juno would gladly eat Priam's children raw ; 
when Jupiter hanged Juno up and fastened a pair of 
anvils to her feet ; also in the description of dreadful 
wounds, and the treatment which (Priam says) dogs 
give to an old man's corpse. The descriptions of Vul- 
can and Thersites are ignoble; so is the mode of 
mourning for Hector adopted by Priam; so is the 
treatment of the populace by Ulysses, which does but 
reflect the manners of the day. I am not now blaming 
Homer for these things ; but I say no treatment can 
elevate the subject; the translator must not be ex- 
pected to make noble what is not so intrinsically. 

If any one think that I am disparaging Homer, 
let me remind him of the horrid grossnesses of Shak- 
speare, which yet are not allowed to lessen our admi- 
ration of Shakspeare's grandeur. The Homer of the 
Iliad is morally pure and often very tender ; but to 
expect refinement and universal delicacy of expression 
in that stage of civilization is quite anachronistic and 
unreasonable. As in earlier England, so in Homeric 
Greece, even high poetry partook of the coarseness 



74 HOMERIC TRANSLATION. 

of society. This was probably inevitable, precisely 
because Greek epic poetry was so natural. 

Mr. Arnold says that I make Homer's nobleness 
eminently ignoble. This suggests to me to quote a 
passage, not because I think myself particularly suc- 
cessful in it, but because the poet is evidently aiming 
to be grand, when his mightiest hero puts forth mighty 
boastings, offensive to some of the gods. It is the 
speech of Achilles over the dead body of Asteropseus 
(Iliad 21, 184). Whether I make it ignoble, by my 
diction or my metre, the reader must judge. 

Lie as thou art. 'Tis hard for thee to strive against the children 

Of overmatching Saturn's son, tho' offspring of a Hiver, 

Thou boastest, that thy origin is from a Stream broad-flowing ; 

I boast," from mighty Jupiter to trace my first beginning. 

A man who o'er the Myrmidons holdeth wide rule, begat me, 

Peleus ; whose father iEacus by Jupiter was gotten. 

Elvers, that trickle to the sea, than Jupiter are weaker ; 

So, than the progeny of Jove, weaker a River's offspring. 

Yea, if he aught avail'd to help, behold ! a mighty Hiver 

Beside thee here : but none can fight with Jove, the child of Saturn. 

Not royal Acheloius with him may play the equal, 

Nor e'en the amplebosom'd strength of deeply-flowing Ocean : 

Tho' from his fulness every Sea and every Hiver welleth, 

And all the ever-bubbling springs and eke their vasty sources. 

Yet at the lightning-bolt of Jove doth even Ocean shudder, 

And at the direful thunder-clap, when from the sky it crasheth. 

Mr. Arnold has in some respects attacked me dis- 
creetly; I mean, where he has said that which da- 



75 

mages me with his readers, and yet leaves me no 
possible reply. What is easier than for one to call 
another ignoble ? what more damaging ? what harder 
to refute ? Then when he speaks of my " metrical 
exploits " how can I be offended ? to what have I to 
reply? His words are expressive either of compli- 
ment or of contempt ; but in either case are untan- 
gible. Again : when he would show how tender he 
has been of my honour, and how unwilling to expose 
my enormities, he says : p. 54 : "I will by no means 
" search in Mr. Newman's version for passages likely 
" to raise a laugh : that search, alas ! would be far 
" too easy ;" I find the pity which the word alas ! 
expresses, to be very clever, and very effective against 
me. But, I think, he was not discreet, but very un- 
wise, in making dogmatic statements on the ground 
of erudition, many of which I have exposed ; and 
about which much more remains to be said than space 
will allow me. 

In his denial that Homer is " garrulous," he com- 
plains that so many think him to be "diffuse." Mr. 
Arnold, it seems, is unaware of that very prominent 
peculiarity ; which suits ill even to Mr. Gladstone's 
style. Thus, where Homer said (and I said) in a pas- 
sage quoted above, " people that have a voice in their 
bosom," Mr. Gladstone has only " speaking men." I 
have noticed the epithet shaggy as quaint, in " His 



76 HOMERIC TRANSLATION. 

heart in his shaggy bosom was divided;" where, in 
a moral thought, a physical epithet is obtruded. But 
even if "shaggy" be dropped, it remains diffuse (and 
characteristically so) to say " my heart in my bosom is 
divided," for, "I doubt." So — "I will speak what 
my heart in my bosom bids me." So, Homer makes 
men think Kara (fypiva teal Kara, 0v/jlov, " in their 
heart and mind;" and deprives them of "mind and 
" soul." Also : " this appeared to him in his mind to 
" be the best counsel." Mr. Arnold assumes tones of 
great superiority; but every schoolboy knows that 
diffuseness is a distinguishing characteristic of Homer. 
Again, the poet's epithets are often selected by their 
convenience for his metre ; sometimes perhaps even 
appropriated for no other cause. No one has ever given 
any better reason why Diomedes and Menelaus are 
almost exclusively called ftorjv ayaObs, except that it 
suits the metre. This belongs to the improvisatore, 
the negligent, the ballad style. The word ivfifieXiT)?, 
which I with others render " ashen-speared," is said 
of Priam, of Panthus, and of sons of Panthus. Mr. 
Arnold rebukes me, p. 99, for violating my own prin- 
ciples. " I say, on the other hand, that €v/a/jl€\lq) 
" has not the effect* of a peculiarity in the original, 
" while e ashen- speared' has the effect of a peculia- 

* Of course no peculiarity of phrase has the effect of pecu- 
liarity on a man who has imperfect acquaintance with the 



PECULIAR EPITHETS. 77 

"rity in the English: and 'warlike' is as marking 
" an equivalent as I dare give for ivfjLfieXico, for fear 
" of disturbing the balance of expression in Homer's 
" sentence." Mr. Arnold cannot write a sentence on 
Greek, without showing an ignorance hard to excuse 
in one who thus comes forward as a vituperating 
censor. Warlike is a word current in the lips and 
books of all Englishmen : ei^/zeXt^? is a word never 
used, never, I believe, in all Greek literature, by any 
one but Homer. If he does but turn to Liddell and 
Scott, he will see their statement, that the Attic form 
evfAeXlas is only to be found in grammars. He is 
here, as always, wrong in his facts. The word is 
most singular in Greek; more singular by far than 
" ashen-spear' d" in English, because it is more ob- 
scure, as is its special application to one or two per- 
sons : and in truth I have doubted whether we any bet- 
ter understand Eumelian Priam than Gerenian Nestor. 
— Mr. Arnold presently imputes to me the opinion 
that xLTcov means " a cloak/' which he does not dis- 
pute ; but if I had thought it necessary to be literal, 
I must have rendered ^aX/co^lrcove^ brazen-shirted. 
He suggests to me the rendering "brazen-coated," 
which T have used in II. 4, 285 and elsewhere. I have 
also used ' ' brazen-clad/' and I now prefer " brazen- 
delicacies of a language ; who, for instance, thinks that 
€Kkt]6ix6s means SouAeia. 



78 HOMERIC TRANSLATION. 

mail'd." I here wish only to press that Mr. Arnold's 
criticism proceeds on a false fact. Homer's epithet 
was not a familiar word at Athens (in any other sense 
than as Burns or Virgil may be familiar to Mr. Ar- 
nold,) but was strange, unknown even to their poets ; 
hence his demand that I shall use a word already 
familiar in English poetry is doubly baseless. The 
later poets of Greece have plenty of words beginning 
with xaX/co-; but this one word is exclusively Homer's. 
— Everything that I have now said, may be repeated 
still more pointedly concerning iv/cvrjfjLiBes, inasmuch 
as directing attention to leg-armour is peculiarly 
quaint. No one in all Greek literature (as far as I 
know) names the word but Homer ; and yet Mr. Ar- 
nold turns on me with his ever reiterated, ever un- 
supported, assertions and censures, of course assuming 
that ee the scholar" is with him. (I have no theory 
at hand, to explain why he regards his own word 
to suffice without attempt at proof.) The epithet is 
intensely peculiar; and I observe that Mr. Arnold 
has not dared to suggest a translation. It is clear to 
me that he is ashamed of my poet's oddities ; and 
has no mode of escaping from them but by bluntly 
denying facts. Equally peculiar to Homer are the 
words Kv&idveLpa, Tavu7re7rXo? and twenty others, — 
equally unknown to Attic the peculiar compound 
juLe\ir)ST)$ (adopted from Homer by Pindar), — about 



Mepo7re9. 79 

all which he carps at me on false grounds. But I 
pass these, and speak a little more at length about 
jjLepoire?. 

Will the reader allow me to vary these tedious de- 
tails, by imagining a conversation between the Aris- 
tophanic Socrates and his clownish pupil Strepsiades. 
I suppose the philosopher to be instructing him in 
the higher Greek, Homer being the text. 

Soc. Now Streppy, tell me what iiepoires avOpcoiroi 
means ? 

Strep. Let me see: fiepoire^? that must mean 
"half-faced." 

Soc. Nonsense, silly fellow : think again. 

Strep. Well then : fjuepoTres, half-eyed, squinting. 

Soc. No; you are playing the fool: it is not our 
07r in oSja?, oyfro/jLai, KaroTTTpov, but another sort of 

07T. 

Strep. Why, you yesterday told me that oivoira 
was "wine-faced," and aWoira "blazing-faced," 
something like our aWloyfr. 

Soc. Ah ! well : it is not so wonderful that you go 
wrong. It is true, there is also vwpoyfr, o-ripo-^r, rjvoty. 
Those might mislead you : /juepoyfr is rather peculiar. 
Now cannot you think of any characteristic of man- 
kind, which jjbepOTTes will express. How do men dif- 
fer from other animals ? 

Strep. I have it ! I heard it from your young friend 



80 HOMERIC TRANSLATION. 

Euclid. Mepoty earlv avQpwrros, " man is a cooking 
" animal." 

Soc. You stupid lout ! what are you at ? what do 
you mean ? 

Strep. Why, fiipo-dr, from fxeipw, I distribute, o^rov 
sauce. 

Soc. No, no : otyov has the 6-ty, with radical im- 
moveable ? in it ; but here bir is the root, and 5 is 
moveable. 

Strep. Now I have got it; fieipco, I distribute, 
qttov, juice, rennet. 

Soc. Wretched man ! you must forget your larder 
and your dairy, if ever you are to learn grammar. — 
Come Streppy : leave rustic words, and think of the 
language of the gods. Did you ever hear of the bril- 
liant goddess Circe and of her oira fcaXrjv ? 

Strep. Oh yes ; Circe and her beautiful face. 

-Soc. I told you, no ! you forgetful fellow. It is 
another o7r. Now I will ask you in a different way. 
Do you know why we call fishes e'WoTre? ? 

Strep. I suppose, because they are cased in scales. 

Soc. That is not it. — (And yet I am not sure. 
Perhaps the fellow is right, after all.) — Well, we will 
not speak any more of e\Xo7re?. But did you never 
hear in Euripides, ov/c eyus yeycovelv oira? What 
does that mean ? 

Strep. " I am not able to shout out, <w 7ro7ro£." 



Mepo7re5. 81 

Soc. No, no, Streppy : but Euripides often uses oira. 
He takes it from Homer, and it is akin to eV, not to 
our oir and much less to iroirot. What does eirr) 
mean? 

Strep. It means such lines as the diviners sing. 

Soc. So it does in Attic, but Homer uses it 'for 
prjfjLara, words ; indeed we also sometimes. 

Strep. Yes, yes, I do know it. All is right. 

Soc. I think you do : well, and 6\jr means a voice, 

Strep. How you learned men like to puzzle us ! I 
often have heard 6irl, owa in the Tragedies, but never 
quite understood it. What a pity they do not say 
</> o)vr] when they mean (fxDvrj. 

Soc. We have at last made one step. Now what 
is pepo-^r ? /jLepo7T6<; avOpcoiTOL. 

Strep. M.€ip(o } I divide, oira, (j)covr]v, voice ; " voice- 
" dividing : " what can that mean ? 

Soc. You have heard a wild dog howl, and a tame 
dog bark : tell me how they differ. 

Strep. The wild dog gives a long long oo-oo, which 
changes like a trumpet if you push your hand up and 
down it ; and the tame dog says bow, wow, wow, like 
two or three panpipes blown one after another. 

Soc. Exactly ; you see the tame dog is humanized : 
he divides his voice into syllables, as men do. " Voice- 
" dividing" means " speaking in syllables." 

G 



82 HOMERIC TRANSLATION. 

Strep. Oh, how clever you are ! 

Soc. Well then, you understand ; " Voice-dividing" 
means articulating. 

Mr. Arnold will see in the Scholiast on Iliad 1, 
250, precisely this order of analysis for /juipoTre^. It 
seems to me to give not a traditional but a gramma- 
tical explanation. Be that as it may, it indicates 
that a Greek had to pass through exactly the same 
process in order to expound ixepoire^, as an English- 
man to get sense out of " voice-dividing." The word 
is twice used by ^Eschylus, who affects Homeric 
words, and once by Euripides (Iph. T.) in the con- 
nection TToXiaiv /Jbepoircovj where the very unusual 
Ionism TroXeaiv shows in how Homeric a region is 
the poet's fancy. No other word ending in oty except 
pepoyfr can be confidently assigned to the root 6-v/r, a 
voice. ^Hvoifr in Homer (itself of most uncertain 
sense and derivation) is generally referred to the other 
6\Jr. The sense of eWo-yjr again* is very uncertain. 
Every way therefore pepo-ty is e ' odd " and obscure. 
The phrase " articulating" is utterly prosaic and inad- 
missible. Vocal is rather too Latinized for my style, 
and besides, is apt to mean melodious. The phrase 
"voice-dividing" is indeed easier to us than fiepoTres 

* 'EAAos- needs light and gives none. Benfey suggests that 
it is for iveos, as SXkos, alius, for Sanscrit anya. He with me 
refers eXkoyjr to AeVw. Cf. squamigeri in Lucretius. 



HOMERIC STRUCTURE. 83 

can have been to the Athenians, because we all know 
what voice means, but they had to be taught scholasti- 
cally what oira meant ; nor would easily guess that 6-^r 
in /xepoi/r had a sense, differing from oi/r in (a)o-Tepo-v|r 
olvoyfr, aWoTJr, aWioyfr, v&poty [rjvo^), ^dpo-^r. Fi- 
nally, since ^epoire^ is only found in the plural, it 
remains an open question, whether it does not mean 
" speaking various languages." Mr. Arnold will find 
that Stephanus and Scapula treat it as doubtful, 
though Liddell and Scott do not name the second in- 
terpretation. I desired to leave in the English all 
the uncertainty of the Greek : but my critic is un- 
encumbered with such cares. 

Hitherto I have been unwillingly thrown into no- 
thing but antagonism to Mr. Arnold, who thereby at 
least adds tenfold value to his praise, and makes me 
proud when he declares that the structure of my sen- 
tences is good and Homeric. For this I give the 
credit to my metre, which alone confers on me this 
cardinal advantage. But in turn I will compliment 
Mr. Arnold at the expense of some other critics. 
He does know, and they do not, the difference of 
flowing and smooth. A mountain torrent is flowing, 
but often very rough ; such is Homer. The " stair- 
cases of Neptune" on the canal of Languedoc are 
smooth, but do not flow : you have to descend abruptly 
from each level to the next. It would be unjust to 

g 2 



84 HOMERIC TRANSLATION. 

say absolutely, that such is Pope's smoothness ; yet 
often, I feel, this censure would not be too severe. 
The rhyme forces him to so frequent a change of the 
nominative, that he becomes painfully discontinuous, 
where Homer is what Aristotle calls " long-linked." 
At the same time, in our language, in order to im- 
part a flowing style, good structure does not suffice. 
A principle is needed, unknown to the Greeks ; viz. 
the natural divisions of the sentence oratorically, must 
coincide with the divisions of the verse musically. To 
attain this always in a long poem, is very difficult to 
a translator who is scrupulous as to tampering with 
the sense. I have not always been successful in this. 
But before any critic passes on me the general sen- 
tence that I am " deficient in flow," let him count up 
the proportion of instances in which he can justly 
make the complaint, and mark whether they occur in 
elevated passages. 

I shall now speak of the peculiarities of my diction, 
under three heads: 1. old or antiquated words; 2. 
coarse words expressive of outward actions, but having 
no moral colour ; 3. words of which the sense has de- 
generated in modern days. 

1. Mr. Arnold appears to regard what is antiquated 
as ignoble. I think him, as usual, in fundamental 
error. In general the nobler words come from an- 
cient style, and in no case can it be said that old 



ANTIQUE ENGLISH. 85 

words (as such) are ignoble. To introduce such terms 
as whereat, therefrom, quoth, beholden, steed, erst, 
anon, anent, into the midst of style which in all other 
respects is modern and prosaic, would be like to that 
which we often hear from half-educated people. The 
want of harmony makes us regard it as lowminded 
and uncouth. From this cause (as I suspect) has 
stolen into Mr. Arnold's mind the fallacy, that the 
words themselves are uncouth.* But the words are 
excellent, if only they are in proper keeping with the 
general style. — Now it is very possible, that in some 
passages, few or many, I am open to the charge of 
having mixed old and new style unskilfully; but I 
cannot admit that the old words (as such) are ignoble. 
No one so speaks of Spenser's dialect, nay, nor of 
Thomson's ; although with Thomson it was assumed, 

* I do not see that Mr. Arnold has any right to reproach. 
me, because he does not know Spenser's word "bragly," 
(which I may have used twice in the Iliad,) or Dryden's word 
" plump," for a mass. The former is so near in sound to brag 
and braw, that an Englishman who is once told that it means 
"proudly fine," ought thenceforward to find it very intelli- 
gible : the latter is a noble modification of the vulgar lump. 
That he can carp as he does against these words and against 
bullcin (= young bullock) as unintelligible, is a testimony how 
little I have imposed of difficulty on my readers. Those who 
know lambkin cannot find bulkin very hard. Since writing 
the above, I see a learned writer in the Philological Museum 
illustrates 'lXij by the old English phrase " a plump of spears." 



86 HOMERIC TRANSLATION. 

exactly as by me, but to a far greater extent, and 
without any such necessity as urges me. As I bave 
stated in my preface, a broad tinge of antiquity in the 
style is essential, to make Homer's barbaric puerili- 
ties and eccentricities less offensive. (Even Mr. Ar- 
nold would admit this, if he admitted my facts : but 
he denies that there is anything eccentric, antique, 
quaint, barbaric in Homer : that is his only way of 
resisting my conclusion.) If Mr. Gladstone were 
able to give his valuable time to woi»k out an entire 
Iliad in his refined modern style, I feel confident that 
he would find it impossible to deal faithfully with the 
eccentric phraseology and with the negligent parts of 
the poem. I have the testimony of an unfriendly re- 
viewer, that I am the first and only translator that 
has dared to give Homer's constant epithets and not 
conceal his forms of thought : of course I could not 
have done this in modern style. The lisping of a 
child is well enough from a child, but is disgusting 
in a full-grown man. Cowper and Pope systemati- 
cally cut out from Homer whatever they cannot make 
stately, and harmonize with modern style : even Mr. 
Brandreth often shrinks, though he is brave enough 
to say ox-eyed Juno. Who then can doubt the ex- 
treme unfitness of their metre and of their modern 
diction? My opposers never fairly meet the argu- 
ment. Mr. Arnold, when most gratuitously censuring 



ANTIQUE ENGLISH. 87 

my mild rendering of «wo? KaKOfirj-^dvov otcpvoiaar]?, 
does not dare to suggest any English for it himself. 
Even Mr. Brandreth skips it. Tt is not merely offensive 
words ; but the purest and simplest phrases, as a man's 
"dear life/' "dear knees/' or his "tightly-built house/' 
are a stumbling-block to translators. No stronger 
proof is necessary, or perhaps is possible, than these 
phenomena give, that to shed an antique hue over 
Homer is of first necessity to a translator : without it, 
injustice is done both to the reader and to the poet. 
Whether I have managed the style well, is a separate 
question, and is matter of detail. I may have some- 
times done well, sometimes ill; but I claim that my 
critics shall judge me from a broader ground, and 
shall not pertinaciously go on comparing my version 
with modern style, and condemning me as (what they 
are pleased to call) inelegant, because it is not like 
refined modern poetry, when it specially avoids to be 
such. They never deal thus with Thomson or Chat- 
terton, any more than with Shakspeare or Spenser. 

There is no sharp distinction possible between the 
foreign and the antiquated in language. What is 
obsolete with us, may still live somewhere : as, what 
in Greek is called Poetic or Homeric, may at the 
same time be living iEolic. So, whether I take a 
word from Spenser or from Scotland, is generally 
unimportant. I do not remember more than four 



88 HOMERIC TRANSLATION. 

Scotch words, which I have occasionally adopted for 
convenience ; viz. Callant, young man ; Canny, right- 
minded ; Bonny, handsome ; to Skirl, to cry shrilly. 
A trochaic word, which I cannot get in English, is 
sometimes urgently needed. It is astonishing to me 
that those who ought to know both what a large 
mass of antique and foreign- sounding words an Athe- 
nian found in Homer, and how many Doric or Sici- 
lian forms as well as Homeric words the Greek tra- 
gedians on principle brought into their songs, should 
make the outcry that they do against my very limited 
use of that which has an antique or Scotch sound. 
Classical scholars ought to set their faces against the 
double heresy, of trying to enforce, that foreign poe- 
try, however various, shall be all rendered into one 
English dialect, and that this shall, in order of words 
and in diction, closely approximate to polished prose. 
From an Oxford Professor I should have expected the 
very opposite spirit to that which Mr. Arnold shows. 
He ought to know and feel that one glory of Greek 
poetry is its great internal variety. He admits the 
principle that old words are a source of ennoblement 
for diction, when he extols the Bible as his standard : 
for surely he claims no rhetorical inspiration for the 
translators. Words which have come to us in a sacred 
connection, no doubt, gain a sacred hue, but they 
must not be allowed to desecrate other old and excel- 



STRONG PHYSICAL WORDS. 89 

lent words. Mr. Arnold informs his Oxford hearers 
that " his Bibliolatry is perhaps excessive." So the 
public will judge, if he say that wench, whore, pate, 
pot, gin, damn, busybody, audience, principality, gene- 
ration, are epical noble words because they are in the 
Bible, and that lief, ken, in sooth, grim, stalwart, gait, 
guise, eld, hie, erst, are bad, because they are not 
there. Nine times out of ten, what are called "poe- 
tical" words, are nothing but antique words, and 
are made ignoble by Mr. Arnold's doctrine. His 
very arbitrary condemnation of eld, lief, in sooth, gait, 
gentle friend in one passage of mine as " bad words," 
is probably due to his monomaniac fancy that there 
is nothing quaint and nothing antique in Homer. 
Excellent and noble as are these words which he re- 
bukes, excellent even for iEschylus, I should doubt 
the propriety of using them in the dialogue of Euri- 
pides ; on the level of which he seems to think Ho- 
mer to be. 

2. Our language, especially the Saxon part of it, 
abounds with vigorous monosyllabic verbs, and dis- 
syllabic frequentatives derived from them, indicative 
of strong physical action. For these words, (which, 
I make no doubt, Mr. Arnold regards as ignoble ple- 
beians,) I claim Quiritarian rights : but I do not wish 
them to displace patricians from high service. Such 
verbs as sweat, haul, plump, maul, yell, bang, splash, 



90 HOMERIC TRANSLATION. 

smash, thump, tug, scud, sprawl, spank, etc., I hold 
(in their purely physical sense) to be eminently epical : 
for the epic revels in descriptions of violent action to 
which they are suited. Intense muscular exertion in 
every form, intense physical action of the surrounding 
elements, with intense ascription or description of size 
or colour; — together make up an immense fraction 
of the poem. To cut out these words is to emasculate 
the epic. Even Pope admits such words. My eye 
in turning his pages was just now caught by : "They 
" tug, they sweat." Who will say that " tug," " sweat " 
are admissible, but " bang," " smash," " sputter " are 
inadmissible? Mr. Arnold resents my saying that 
Homer is often homely. He is homely expressly be- 
cause he is natural. The epical diction admits both 
the gigantesque and the homely : it inexorably refuses 
the conventional, under which is comprised a vast 
mass of what some wrongly call elegant. But while 
I justify the use of homely words in a primary phy- 
sical, I deprecate them in a secondary moral sense. 
Mr. Arnold clearly is dull to this distinction, or he 
would not utter against me the following taunt, p. 85 : 
" To grunt and sweat under a weary load does 
perfectly well where it comes in Shakspeare : but if 
the translator of Homer, who will hardly have wound 
up our minds to the pitch at which these words of 
Hamlet find them, were to employ, when he has to 



COARSE METAPHOR. 91 

speak of Homer's heroes under the load of calamity, 
this figure of ' grunting' and 'sweating/ we should 
say, He Newmanizes." 

Mr. Arnold here not only makes a mistake, he pro- 
pagates a slander ; as if I had ever used such words 
as grunt and siveat morally. If Homer in the Iliad 
spoke of grunting swine, as he does of sweating steeds, 
so should I. As the coarse metaphors here quoted 
from Shakspeare are utterly opposed to Homer's style, 
to obtrude them on him would be a gross offence. 
Mr. Arnold sends his readers away with the belief 
that this is my practice, though he has not dared to 
assert it. I bear such coarseness in Shakspeare, not 
because I am " wound up to a high pitch " by him, 
"borne away by a mighty current," — (which Mr. 
Arnold, with ingenious unfairness to me, assumes 
to be certain in a reader of Shakspeare and all but 
impossible in a reader of Homer,) — but because I 
know, that in Shakspeare's time all literature was 
coarse, as was the speech of courtiers and of the queen 
herself. Mr. Arnold imputes to me Shakspeare's 
coarseness, from which I instinctively shrink; and 
when his logic leads to the conclusion, "he Shak- 
" spearizes," he with gratuitous rancour turns it into 
" he Newmanizes." 

Some words which with the Biblical translators 
seem to have been noble, I should not now dare to 



92 HOMERIC TRANSLATION. 

use in the primitive sense. For instance, " His ini- 
quity shall fall upon his own pate" Yet I think 
pate a good metaphorical word and have used it of 
the sea -waves, in a bold passage, II. 13, 795 : 

Then on rush'd they, with weight and mass like to a troublous 

whirlwind, 
Which from the thundercloud of Jove down on the champaign 

plumpeth, 
And doth the briny flood bestir with an unearthly uproar : 
Then in the everbrawling sea full many a billow splasheth, 
Hollow, and bald with hoary pate, one racing after other. 

Is there really no " mighty current " here, to sweep 
off petty criticism ? 

I have a remark on the strong physical word 
"plumpeth" here used. It is fundamentally Mil- 
ton's, " plumb down he drops ten thousand fathom 
" deep ;" plumb and plump in this sense are clearly 
the same root. I confess I have not been able to 
find the verb in an old writer, though it is so common 
now. Old writers do not say " to plumb down," but 
" to drop plumb down." Perhaps in a second edition, 
(if I reach to it,) I may alter the words to "plumb.. . . 
" droppeth," on this ground ; but I do turn sick at 
the mawkishness of critics, one of whom, who ought 
to know better, tells me that the word plump re- 
minds him " of the crinolined hoyden of a boarding- 
" school " ! ! If he had said, " It is too like the phrase 



HOMERIC VEHEMENCE. 93 

" of a sailor, — of a peasant, — of a schoolboy/' this 
objection would be at least intelligible. However : 
the word is intended to express the violent impact of 
a body descending from aloft, — and it does express it. 

Mr. Arnold censures me for representing Achilles 
as yelling. He is depicted by the poet as in the most 
violent physical rage, boiling over with passion and 
wholly uncontrouled. He smacks his two thighs at 
once; he rolls on the ground, /jLeyas fjueyaXcoarl ; he 
denies his hair with dust ; he rends it ; he grinds his 
teeth; fire flashes from his eyes; but — he may not 
" yell," that would not be comme il faut ! We shall 
agree, that in peace nothing so becomes a hero as 
modest stillness; but that ^'Peleus' son, insatiate of 
" combat," full of the fiercest pent-up passion, should 
vent a little of it in a yell, seems to me quite in place. 
That the Greek Id^wv is not necessarily to be so ren- 
dered, I am aware; but it is a very vigorous word, 
like peal and shriek ; neither of which would here 
suit. I sometimes render it skirl : but " battle-yell " 
is a received rightful phrase. Achilles is not a stately 
Virgilian plus JEneas, but is a far wilder barbarian. 

After Mr. Arnold has laid upon me the sins of 
Shakspeare, he amazes me by adding, p. 86 : " The 
idiomatic language of Shakspeare, — such language as 
' prate of his whereabout? 'jump the life to come/ — 
' the damnation of his taking-off,' — ' quietus make with 



94 HOMERIC TRANSLATION. 

' a bare bodkin/ should be carefully observed by the 
translator of Homer ; although in every case he will 
have to decide for himself, whether the use, by him, 
of Shakspeare's liberty, will or will not clash with his 
indispensable duty of nobleness." 

Of the Shakspearianisms here italicized by Mr. 
Arnold, there is not one which I could endure to 
adopt. " His whereabout," I regard as the flattest 
prose. (The word prate is a plebeian which I admit in 
its own low places ; but how Mr. Arnold can approve 
of it, consistently with his attacks on me, I do not 
understand.) Damnation and Taking-off, (for Guilt 
and Murder,) and Jump, I absolutely reject; and 
" quietus make" would be nothing but an utterly in- 
admissible quotation from Shakspeare. Jump as an 
active verb is to me monstrous, but Jump is just the 
sort of modern prose word which is not noble. Leap, 
Bound, for great action, Skip, Frisk, Gambol for 
smaller, are all good. 

I have shown against Mr. Arnold, (1) that Homer 
was out-and-out antiquated to the Athenians, even 
when perfectly understood by them ; (2) that his con- 
ceptions, similes, phraseology and epithets are habi- 
tually quaint, strange, unparalleled in Greek litera- 
ture ; and pardonable only to semibarbarism ; (3) that 
they are intimately related to his noblest excellencies ; 
(4) that many words are so peculiar as to be still 



COARSE PHYSICAL WORDS. 95 

doubtful to us j (5) I have indicated that some of his 
descriptions and conceptions are horrible to us, though 
they were not so to his barbaric auditors j (6) that 
considerable portions of the poem are not poetry, but 
rhythmical prose like Horace's Satires, and are in- 
teresting to us not as poetry but as portraying the 
manners or sentiments of the day. I now add (7) 
what is inevitable in all high and barbaric poetry, — 
perhaps in all high poetry, — many of his energetic 
descriptions are expressed in coarse physical words. 
I do not here attempt proof, for it might need a trea- 
tise : but I give one illustration ; II. 13, 136, T/xwe? 
irpovrvy^av aoWees. Cowper, misled by the ignis 
fatuus of " stateliness," renders it absurdly 

TliepowWs of Ilium gave the first assault, 
Embattled close ; 

but it is strictly, "The Trojans knocked-forward (or, 
" thumped, butted, forward) in close pack." The verb 
is too coarse for later polished prose, and even the 
adjective is very strong [packed together) . I believe, 
that " Forward in pack the Troians pitch' d" would 
not be really unfaithful to the Homeric colour ; and I 
maintain that " Forward in mass the Troians pitched," 
would be an irreprovable rendering. 

Dryden in this respect is in entire harmony with 
Homeric style. No critic deals fairly with me in 



96 HOMERIC TRANSLATION. 

isolating any of these strong words, and then appeal- 
ing to his readers whether I am not ignoble. Hereby 
he deprives me of the aycov, the " mighty current" of 
Mr. Arnold, and he misstates the problem ; which is, 
whether the word is suitable, then and there, for the 
work required of it, as the coalman at the pit, the 
clown in the furrow, the huntsman in the open field. 

3. There is a small number of words, not natural 
plebeians, but patricians on which a most unjust bill 
of attainder has been passed, which I seek to reverse. 
On the first which I name, Mr. Arnold will side with 
me, because it is a Biblical word, — wench. In Lan- 
cashire I believe that at the age of about sixteen a 
ct gi r i" turns into " a wench," or as we say " a young 
" woman." In Homer, " girl" and " young woman" 
are alike inadmissible ; " maid" or " maiden" will not 
always suit, and u wench" is the natural word. I do 
not know that I have used it three times, but I claim 
a right of using it, and protest against allowing the 
heroes of slang to deprive us of excellent words by 
their perverse misuse. If the imaginations of some 
men are always in satire and in low slang, so much 
the worse for them : but the more we yield to such 
demands, the more will be exacted. I expect, before 
long, to be told that brick is an ignoble word, mean- 
ing a jolly fellow, and that sell, cut are out of place 
in Homer. My metre, it seems, is inadmissible with 



MISUSED WORDS. 97 

some, because it is the metre of Yankee Doodle ! as 
if Homer's metre were not that of the Margites. 
Every noble poem is liable to be travestied, as the 
Iliad and iEschylus and Shakspeare have been. Every 
burlesque writer uses the noble metre, and caricatures 
the noble style. Mr. Arnold says, I must not render 
Tavv7re7r\o<; " trailing-rob'd," because it reminds him 
of " long petticoats sweeping a dirty pavement." 
"What a confession as to the state of his imagination ! 
Why not, of "a queen's robe trailing on a marble 
" pavement" ? Did he never read 

iveiikov /xiv KaTe^evev eavbv narpos in ovdei ? 

I have digressed: I return to words which have 
been misunderstood. A second word is of more im- 
portance, Imp ; which properly means a Graft. The 
best translation of <w A^Sa? epvos to my mind, is, 
"O imp of Leda !" for neither " bud of Leda," nor 
" scion of Leda" satisfy me ; much less " sprig" or 
" shoot of Leda." The theological writers so often 
used the phrase " imp of Satan" for u child of the 
" devil," that (since Bunyan ?) the vulgar no longer 
understand that imp means scion, child, and suppose 
it to mean " little devil." A Reviewer has omitted 
to give his unlearned readers any explanation of the 
word (though I carefully explained it) and calls down 
their indignation upon me by his censures, which I 
hope proceeded from carelessness and ignorance. 



98 HOMERIC TRANSLATION. 

Even in Spenser's Fairy Queen the word retains its 
rightful and noble sense : 

Well worthy imp I then said the lady, etc., 

and in North's Plutarch, 

" He took upon him to protect him from them all, 
" and not to suffer so goodly an imp [Alcibiades] to 
" lose the good fruit of his youth." 

Dryden uses the verb, To imp ; to graft, insert. 

I was quite aware that I claimed of my readers a 
certain strength of mind, when I bid them to forget 
the defilements which vulgarity has shed over the 
noble word Imp, and carry their imaginations back 
two or three centuries : but I did not calculate that 
any critic would call Dainty grotesque. This word is 
equivalent in meaning to Delicate and Nice, but has 
precisely the epical character in which both those 
words are deficient. For instance, I say, that after the 
death of Patroclus, the coursers " stood motionless," 

Drooping toward the ground their heads, and down their plaintive 

eyelids 
Did warm tears trickle to the ground, their charioteer bewailing. 
Denied were their dainty manes, over the yoke-strap dropping. 

A critic who objects to this, has to learn English from 
my translation. Does he imagine that Dainty can 
mean nothing but "over-particular as to food"? 
In the compound Dainty-cheek'd, Homer shows 



MISUSED WORDS. 99 

his own epic peculiarity. It is imitated in the similar 
word ev7rdpaos applied to the Gorgon Medusa by 
Pindar : but not in the Attics. I have somewhere 
read, that the rudest conception of female beauty is 
that of a brilliant red plump cheek; — such as an 
English clown admires; ( — was this what Pindar 
meant?) the second stage looks to the delicacy of 
tint in the cheek ; (this is Homer's fcaXkiTrdpyo? :) 
the third looks to shape ; (this is the et///,op0o? of 
the Attics, the formosus of the Latins, and is seen in 
the Greek sculpture :) the fourth and highest looks 
to moral expression : this is the idea of Christian 
Europe. That Homer rests exclusively in the second 
or semibarbaric stage, it is not for me to say, but, as 
far as I am able, to give to the readers of my transla- 
tion materials for their own judgment. From the 
vague word elSo?, species, appearance, it cannot be 
positively inferred whether the poet had an eye for 
Shape. The epithets curl-eyed and fine-ankled deci- 
dedly suggest that he had ; except that his applica- 
tion of the former to the entire nation of the Greeks 
makes it seem to be of foreign tradition, and as un- 
real as brazen- mailed. 

Another word which has been ill-understood and ill- 
used, is dapper. Of the epithet dappergreav'd for 
ev/cvrjfiU I certainly am not enamoured, but I have 
not yet found a better rendering. It is easier to carp 



100 HOMERIC TRANSLATION. 

at my phrase, than to suggest a better. The word 
dapper in Dutch = German tapfer ; and like the Scotch 
braw or brave means with us fine, gallant, elegant. 
I have read the line of an old poet, * 

The dapper words which lovers use, 
for elegant, I suppose ; and so " the dapper does" and 
" dapper elves" of Milton must refer to elegance or 
refined beauty. What is there* ignoble in such a 
word ? " Elegant" and " pretty" are inadmissible in 
epic poetry : " dapper" is logically equivalent, and has 
the epic colour. Neither " fair" nor " comely" here 
suit. As to the school translation " wellgreav'd," 
every common Englishman on hearing the sound re- 
ceives it as " wellgrieved," and to me it is very un- 
pleasing. A part of the mischief, a large part of it, 
is in the word greave ; for dapper-girdled is on the 
whole well-received. But what else can we say for 
greave? leggings? gambados? 

Much perhaps remains to be learnt concerning 
Homer's perpetual epithets. My very learned col- 
league Goldstiicke, Professor of Sanscrit, is convinced 
that the epithet cow-eyed of the Homeric Juno is an 
echo of the notion of Hindoo poets, that (if I re- 
member his statement) "the sunbeams are the cows 
" of heaven." The sacred qualities of the Hindoo cow 

* I observe that Lord Lyttelton renders Milton's dapper 
elf by pahiva. " softly moving." 



PERPETUAL EPITHETS. 10] 

are perhaps not to be forgotten. I have myself been 
struck by the phrase Su'7reTeo? 7rord/jLoto as akin to 
the idea that the Ganges falls from Mount Meru, the 
Hindoo Olympus. Also the meaning of two other 
epithets has been revealed to me from the pictures of 
Hindoo ladies. First, curl-eyed, to which I have re- 
ferred above ; secondly, rosy -fingered Aurora. For 
Aurora is an " Eastern lady ; " and, as such, has the 
tips of her fingers dyed rosy-red, whether by henna 
or by some more brilliant drug. Who shall say that 
the kings and warriors of Homer do not derive from 
the East their epithet " Jove-nurtured " ? or that this 
or that goddess is not called "golden-throned" or 
" fair- throned " in allusion to Assyrian sculpture or 
painting, as Rivers probably drew their later poetical 
attribute " bull-headed " from the sculpture of foun- 
tains ? It is a familiar remark, that Homer's poetry 
presupposes a vast preexisting art and material. Much 
in him was traditional. Many of his wild legends 
came from Asia. He is to us much beside a poet ; 
and that a translator should assume to cut him down 
to the standard of modern taste, is a thought which 
all the higher minds of this age have outgrown. How 
much better is that reverential Docility, which with 
simple and innocent wonder, receives the oddest no- 
tions of antiquity as material of instruction yet to be 
revealed, than the self-complacent Criticism, which 



102 HOMERIC TRANSLATION. 

pronouncing every tiling against modern taste to be 
grotesque* and contemptible, squares the facts to its 
own " Axioms " ! Homer is noble : but this or that 
epithet is not noble : therefore we must explode it from 
Homei* ! I value, I maintain, I struggle for the " high 
1 ' a priori road " in its own place ; but certainly not in 
historical literature. To read Homer's own thoughts, 
is to wander in a world abounding with freshness : 
but if we insist on treading round and round in our 
own footsteps, we shall never ascend those heights 
whence the strange region is to be seen. Surely an 
intelligent learned critic ought to inculcate on the 
unlearned, that if they would get instruction from 
Homer, they must not expect to have their ears tickled 
by a musical sound as of a namby-pamby poetaster ; 
but must look on a metre as doing its duty, when 
it "strings the mind up to the necessary pitch" in 
elevated passages ; and that instead of demanding of 
a translator everywhere a rhythmical perfection which 
perhaps can only be attained by a great sacrifice of 

* Mr. Arnold calls it an unfortunate sentence of mine : " I 
" ought to be quaint ; I ought not to be grotesque." I am dis- 
posed to think him right, but for reasons very opposite to 
those which he assigns. I have " unfortunately " given to 
querulous critics a cue for attacking me unjustly. I should 
rather have said : " We ought to be quaint, and not to shrink 
" from that which the fastidious modern will be sure to call 
"■grotesque in English, when he is too blunted by habit or too 
" poor a scholar to discern it in the Greek." 



DOCILITY IN THE READER. 103 

higher qualities, they should be willing to submit to 
a small part of that ruggedness, which Mr. Arnold 
cheerfully bears in Homer himself through the loss 
of the Digamma. And now, for a final protest. To 
be stately is not to be grand. Nicolas of Russia may 
have been stately like Cowper, Garibaldi is grand like 
the true Homer. A diplomatic address is stately ; it 
is not grand, nor often noble. To expect a transla- 
tion of Homer to be pervadingly elegant, is absurd : 
Homer is not such, any more than is the side of an 
Alpine mountain. The elegant and the picturesque 
are seldom identical, however much of delicate beauty 
may be interstudded in the picturesque : but this has 
always got plenty of what is shaggy and uncouth, 
without which contrast the full delight of beauty 
would not be attained. I think Moore in his charac- 
teristic way tells of a beauty 

Shining on, shining on, by no shadow made tender, 
Till love falls asleep in the sameness of splendour. 

Such certainly is not Homer's. His beauty, when at 
its height, is wild beauty : it smells of the mountain 
and the sea. If he be compared to a noble animal, it 
is not to such a spruce rubbed-down Newmarket racer 
as our smooth translators would pretend, but to a wild 
horse of the Don Cossacks : and if I, instead of this, 
present to the reader nothing but a Dandie Dinmont's 
pony, this, as a first approximation, is a valuable step 
towards the true solution. 



104 HOMERIC TRANSLATION. 

Before the best translation of the Iliad of which 
our language is capable, can be produced, the English 
public has to unlearn the false notion of Homer which 
his deliberately faithless versifiers have infused. Chap- 
man's conceits unfit his translation for instructing the 
public, even if his rhythm "jolted" less, if his struc- 
ture were simpler, and his dialect more intelligible. 
My version, if allowed to be read, will prepare the 
public to receive a version better than mine. I re- 
gard it as a question about to open hereafter, whether 
a translator of Homer ought not to adopt the old dis- 
syllabic landis, houndis, hartis, etc., instead of our 
modern unmelodious lands, hounds, harts; whether 
the ye or y before the past participle may not be re- 
stored ; the want of which confounds that participle 
with the past tense. Even the final -en of the plural 
of verbs (we dancen, they singen, etc.) still subsists in 
Lancashire. It deserves consideration whether by a 
few such slight grammatical retrogressions into anti- 
quity a translator of Homer might not add much 
melody to his poem and do good service to the lan- 
guage. 



TAYLOR, FRINTER, LITTLE QUEEN STREET, W.C. 



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